HAPPY HALLOWEN!
Be sure to click on the graphics for a close up view...Ha!
Be sure to click on the graphics for a close up view...Ha!
Click for a full report.
An interview with Naomi Wolf about the 10 steps from democracy to dictatorship!
Stop The Spying Now
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Impeachment (Plus) Morning Updates
PHOTOS FROM PHILLY: Jeffery Brewerhttp://picasaweb.google.com/Jeffery.Brewer/MarchInPhilly10272007
Forget Impeachment, Put Bush and Cheney in a Straightjacket
"Iran is now a major threat to Europe? The Iranians are going to launch a nuclear missile (that they don't yet possess) against Europe!?" This has got to stop before the megalomaniacs in the oval office destroy this entire planet.
Digg / upcoming - http://digg.com/
Written by Web Master Saturday, 12 June 2004
The Virginia primary elections are in February. In order to get Dennis Kucinich on the Virginia primary ballot as a presidential candidate we need to get 10,000 signatures of registered voters by December 5, 2007.
In addition to the 10,000 signature rule, we must get a minimum of 400 signatures from each of the eleven (11) Virginia Congressional voting districts. We need volunteers to gather signatures for the Kucinich campaign. All volunteers must be voters registered in the State of Virginia.
We are using VA for Dennis K as the Volunteer Campaign site. When you visit you'll notice that there is now a Groups for Dennis Kucinich area.
How to Register as a Volunteer
1. Go to http://vafordennisk.org
2. Click Register and complete the form
3. Enter your username and password and then click Login
4. Click Groups for Kucinich
5. Click the link Kucinich Volunteers The 11 Virginia Voting Districts are listed; click Join Group for your voting district (be certain to only join one group)
6. Go to Group Functions at the top of the Group page and choose Group Members
7. Click on your name (you can now Edit your Profile, Add a picture, or Make a Connection with another volunteer)
8. Click Update to keep the changes
Kucinich to Introduce Cheney Impeachment Resolution
Political Cortex - New York,NY,USA
Impeachment is imperative in the face of Cheney-Bush neoconservative actions in brutal defiance of the US Constitution and international law. ...
See all stories on this topic
Anything less than impeachment is dereliction of lawmakers' duties
By IR Editor
And while the state constitution does allow for his impeachment by the Illinois House and trial by the Senate, it's doubtful legislators could bring themselves to such drastic action. So the realistic question becomes this: Given the ...
Thousands march across the country for impeachment and to end the war
The October 27 demonstrations represented another important step forward for the impeachment and anti-war movement in the United States. Over 100000 people took to the streets in coordinated regional and local protests to demand an ...
AfterDowningStreet.org - Impeach... - http://www.afterdowningstreet
[Video] National Impeachment Protests: Oct 27, 2007
By CausalCrunch
Here are videos from a few of the cities (Washington, Illinois, California, New York, Arizona) which held protests across the nation. Feel free to send us others to add.
BuzzFlash.net: queued - http://www.buzzflash.net
THE SECOND ANNUAL BOSTON TEA PARTY AND CONFERENCE FOR 9/11 TRUTH!
Scientists & Citizens Speak Out!
December 15 &16, 2007
Building on the success of last year’s inaugural event, Boston 9/11 Truth is proud to present two days of 911 truth activism at this year’s Boston Tea Party and Conference for 9/11 Truth, to be held Saturday and Sunday, December 15 and 16, 2007. This year’s theme, “Scientists and Citizens Speak Out,” reinforces our commitment to the broadest exposure possible of the scientific, criminal and political issues being covered-up and/or ignored by our government and the media concerning the events of September 11, 2001.
CONFERENCE
SATURDAY DECEMBER 15
The weekend’s events will kick off with a day-long conference on Saturday December 15 at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall and is entitled, “The Destruction of World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7: A Case for Controlled Demolition.” In this scientific look at the collapses, a panel of four well-known and credentialed science and engineering professionals will present the case that the government’s theories could not possibly be true and that most of the evidence points to the one theory that’s been completely avoided by the government and the media – controlled demolition.
The Truth Movement got a huge boost in 2007 when California architect Richard Gage, AIA, exploded onto the scene with “Architects and Engineers for Truth” (AE911Truth). Opening the presentations on Saturday morning at one of America’s most famous meeting halls, Gage will be joined by long-time 9/11 researcher and former BYU physics professor Dr. Steven Jones, Underwriters Laboratories whistleblower Kevin Ryan, and new to the scene, Dr. Joel Hirschhorn, who in September 2007 came out with an unequivocal endorsement of the work of AE911Truth. Dr. Hirschhorn is formerly a professor of Metallurgy at the University of Wisconsin and was a senior staff member at the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment from 1978 to 1991, testifying more than 50 times before congress on scientific issues. He is the author of several books, including, “Delusional Democracy: Fixing the Republic Without Overthrowing the Government.” We enthusiastically welcome Dr. Hirschhorn to the growing list of distinguished scientists and true patriots who are willing to step forward and speak out on the 9/11 cover-up. The Conference will conclude with a panel discussion and Q&A session.
Volunteer activists from across New England are currently working hard on a campaign to impress upon the academic, architectural and engineering communities near Boston, the need for honesty in dealing with the scientific data related to the horrific crime on September 11. Huge efforts are being made to invite as many of these academics and professionals as possible to the Conference, to judge for themselves where the scientific evidence points. Your support of this event makes that possible. For information on the Conference and how to purchase tickets, visit http://boston911conference.eventbrite.com.
THE TEA PARTY FOR 911 TRUTH
SUNDAY DECEMBER 16
The 9/11 Commission Report, the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act, Presidential Directive #51, the FEMA Report, the continuously revised and delayed NIST Report – the list off attacks on the truth and on our rights and freedoms continues to grow every day, by decree of this administration and with the blessings of Congress. The need to reject this encroachment is even greater than last year and the need for a Tea Party is NOW! The media in New England is ever so slowly waking from its slumber on 9/11 issues and we need to be out there in numbers to make sure they don’t drift back to sleep. As we did in 2006, we will read a 9/11 Truth Proclamation at a downtown Boston location (to be announced) and publicly declare our demand to reopen the 9/11 investigations. Barbara Honegger, Dr. Robert Bowman, Dr. Kevin Barrett and many others from last year are on board for this year’s event (watch website for updates).
We are also encouraging the participation of Peace & Justice and Impeachment activists who feel abandoned by the 110th Congress, which failed to act on it’s ’06 promises to end our illegal occupation of Iraq, with the hope that together we might demonstrate to the public that it’s ALL one big lie. The “Tea Party” will then disperse and reconvene near the site of the original 1773 Tea Party at the Evelyn Moakely Bridge, where hence, we will ceremoniously cast into the sea these documents of tyranny that have been cynically imposed on a terrorized public. The media will be invited.
The Tea Party events on Sunday will begin with a public rally, with a reading of the Boston Tea Party for 9/11 Truth Proclamation and, “Dumping” of the 9/11 Commission Report, (including the Patriot Acts, Military Commission Act, PD51 and others) at the Moakley Bridge at 3:00 pm, and concludes with a “Celebration” at the adjacent Barking Crab restaurant and pub beginning at 4:00 pm.
Last year’s Boston Tea Party reverberated around the country, with 9/11 Truth coalitions stretching from Washington DC to San Francisco Bay staging their own Tea Parties and joining us in publicly rejecting the 9/11 Commission Report. We encourage truth activists across America in planning their own local events in support of our public denunciation, standing together as one in our cause.
Buy your tickets now for the Boston Tea Party Conference.
FANEUIL HALL CONFERENCE TICKETS (Sat. Dec. 15):
Please support 9/11 Truth with your financial contribution now to help make this event possible.
Buy a ticket for yourself, a co-worker, friend or neighbor.
All-day Ticket:
$35.00 (purchased after Nov. 21)
$25.00 (purchased before Nov 21)
$15.00 (Students and Seniors)
For a list of accommodations, arrangements for out-of-town guests and schedules, visit http://boston911truth.org/teaparty
Purchase Tickets Online: http://boston911conference.eventbrite.com
OR Donate:
http://tinyurl.com/2evzgo
Boston 9/11 Tea Party and Conference -
Voice Mail: 617-401-8047 Web: http://boston911truth.org
Email: truth@boston911truth.org
BANNERS:
http://www.boston911truth.org/banners.php
HARTFORD, Conn. -- The FBI and federal prosecutors have contacted U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman's office about at least $14,000 in contributions to his 2004 presidential campaign made by a now-indicted Danbury-area businessman and his associates, a spokesman for the senator has confirmed.
James Galante, 54, of New Fairfield, his associates and their relatives donated to Lieberman's presidential campaign in the fall of 2003, the Hartford Courant reported Sunday, citing federal campaign records.
Galante and 28 other people were indicted last year in a federal investigation of the mob's alleged influence on the trash hauling industry in western Connecticut and upstate New York. Galante, who owns several trash businesses, has pleaded not guilty to 93 federal counts including racketeering, extortion and fraud.
State authorities have also charged Galante with making illegal campaign contributions to other politicians. Galante's lawyer, Hugh Keefe, said his client is accused of making about $38,000 on donations to three political action committees through straw donors.
Galante is awaiting trial on the federal charges related to the garbage hauling investigation. Through a spokesman, he said he would not comment on the campaign money.
No charges have been filed in connection with the donations to Lieberman's presidential campaign.
Rob Sawicki, Lieberman's press secretary, said federal authorities have asked the senator's office about the circumstances surrounding the contributions. He said no one in the campaign knew about any impropriety involved with the donations made through Galante.
Lieberman will donate that money to a charity if federal authorities determine that the donations were illegal, Sawicki said.
"Those donations would never have been accepted had the campaign been aware of any wrongdoing in the bundling of those donations," he said.
The state campaign finance charges against Galante were filed on Oct. 13. He is accused of making suspect $1,000 contributions in 2002 and 2003 to the political action committees. Those committees were controlled by state Sen. Louis DeLuca, R-Woodbury, state Sen. David Cappiello, R-Danbury, and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, the Courant reported.
It is not illegal to "bundle" contributions from several people and give them to a candidate at one time. But it is against the law to use bundling to exceed campaign contribution limits by funneling money through third parties who write checks within the limits.
DeLuca, Cappiello and Boughton are also not targets of the federal investigation. All three have said that they believed the contributions from Galante and his associates were legitimate. Cappiello, who is running for Congress in the 5th District, said he has donated the contributions in question to charity.
Several of Galante's employees, friends and relatives who state authorities say donated to the three PACs also gave a total of $10,000 to Lieberman's presidential campaign in November 2003, the federal campaign finance records show.
Galante himself gave Lieberman's campaign another $2,000 in September 2003, and a lobbyist for Galante donated $2,000 that year, the records show.
Dear Member of the Nation Community,
Tuesday's the big day. That's when Congress will hold a hearing on the outrageous Time Warner-inspired postage rate hike that's saddled The Nation with a half million dollar annual increase in postal costs and brought other small publications to the brink of financial disaster. Now's the moment for champions of independent media to take a stand.
We're joining our friends at Free Press to collect 100,000 signatures, and we want to have phones ringing off the hook on Capitol Hill by Tuesday.
Please send a message to Congress, post haste.
Our founding fathers knew that a free press is a cornerstone of democracy. That's why they encouraged small publishers and a broad spectrum of opinions in media by guaranteeing fair postal rates for all.
But mega-magazines have undermined that founding principle. Time Warner and others like them are passing the buck onto smaller independent publishers, threatening to silence the fearless investigative journalism that small media outlets like The Nation are known for.
Now is our chance to restore the founder's vision.
The Nation isn't the only small magazine forced to foot the bill. We're on the same page with small publishers on the opposite side of the aisle, like National Review, who have also been hit hard by the increase.
It's not just the fate of your favorite magazine that rests on the outcome of this hearing. The health of our nation's open public discourse hangs in the balance.
Your Congressperson needs to hear from you now. Please let them know you won't stand by quietly while the future of independent publications are at risk.
Thank you in advance for doing your part today -- and thank you for all you've done on this critical issue during the past few months. Without the help of grassroots activists like yourself we wouldn't even be witnessing these important hearings! Your support is amazing and we are truly grateful.
Sincerely,
Teresa Stack
President, The Nation
Priests Jailed for Protesting Fort Huachuca Torture Training
By Bill Quigley
t r u t h o u t | Report
Monday, October 29, 2007
Another Graphic Graffiti Assault On Our "Leaders" And Our Situation
Unfortunately it is true that the administration is corrupt, corrosive and criminal, but at the same time we are allowing ourselves to be divided and spend so much time and energy running around like the proverbial chicken with its head chopped off, lint picking everything anyone has to say or suggest, when what must be done is shut up, focus, and act in a way that this Congress and the American people cannot ignore.
It cannot be business as usual or we are damned. A nation so fond of its reality TV must be awaken to the reality that we are heading for dictatorial rule in this nation, one step at a time, day by day, and that if we do not have the will and the courage to take to the streets where we cannot be ignored by the sleeping masses and culprit press, then this nation and we are about to become the "Generation Of Failure".
It will be said of us that: "We met the enemy, and he was us!"
Like a major tectonic event our political system must be shaken to bedrock!
Blackwater Back In The News With An Immunity Deal From The White House!
BLACKWATER BACK IN THE NEWS WITH IMMUNITY DEAL!
BUSH TO LET MORE SENATORS SEE SURVEILLANCE MEMOS SHIELD FOR TELECOM FIRMS UP FOR VOTE!
Blackwater Immunity Deal: Huge Conflict-of-Interest
State Department investigators of the September 16h Blackwater Nisour Square shooting have granted limited immunity to Blackwater operators who were present at the incident, according to the Associated Press. But the press reports missed a key fact: The State Department's investigators are from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the very bureau of the State Department that contracts with Blackwater for the services in question and that is responsible for operational control of those missions. Can you say conflict of interest?
The Internal Links Here Are Comprehensive!
Immunity Deals Offered to Blackwater Guards New York Times
AP: Blackwater guards given immunity in Iraq killings USA Today
FBI Blackwater Probe Hits Stumbling Block CBS News
Truthdig –
Immunity deal hampers Blackwater inquiry
KVIA, TX - 57 minutes ago
Security contractors lose immunity in Iraq
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - Oct 24, 2007
A closer look at Iraq's report on clash involving Blackwater
Minneapolis Star Tribune (subscription), MN - Oct 8, 2007
Results about 2,268 for BLACKWATER IMMUNITY. (GOOGLE WEB)
Results about 431,000 for BLACKWATER IMMUNITY. Google News)
Bush to let more senators see surveillance memos Shield for telecom firms up for vote By James Rowley, Bloomberg News | October 26, 2007
ADDITIONAL UPDATES: PEACE AND IMPEACHMENT
http://www.worldcantwait.net
http://www.impeachbush.org/site/PageServer
http://www.partnersforpeace.org
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/12/04059/459
A Don't Miss Kucinich Event
KUCINICHR.COM - ANNOUNCING THE BEST TELEVISION NOT ON TV
DON’T MISS THIS!
I don't know what you're doing on the night of the Democratic debate tomorrow, but if you're by your computer, why not join us for a chat?
Congressman Kucinich's appearance will not only be the biggest event on national television since the World Series has ended, but he'll also be broadcasting live via the internet as well! We've set up Kucinichr.com, an internet channel where the campaign can host its own live programming.
On Kucinichr.com, Dennis will be broadcasting live backstage from the debate. If your computer can access the internet, you're one click away from watching and talking to the Congressman and other supporters live.
It's not too late to host a debate party, grab some friends, and talk about Dennis Kucinich.
The debate is from 9:00-11:00 PM EST on MSNBC, and the live conversation on Kucinichr starts at 11:00, immediately following the debate.
Even if you can't make it to a party or a TV, you and your friends can still go to Kucinichr.com tomorrow night for an interactive broadcast with supporters, campaign staff and Dennis Kucinich!
If the media doesn't cover our growing campaign - polling at 7% in New Hampshire, preferred in principle by most voters(2), and fueled by Americans like you - we'll cover ourselves! For programming of substance, tune into our channel along with everyone else that you can show this site to.
At 11:00 EST after the debate, we hope you join us at Kucinichr.com. Just click the link and have a conversation with the campaign!
Thanks again and Strength through Peace,
Kucinich for President
Here is the conference call information for the debate house party:
Call-in Number: (605) 772-3500
Access Code: 471770978#
Remember the conference call will also be simulcast online via the website www.kucinichR.com (that's right... with an 'r' at the end).
Also, we want you to know that this house party is a great time to promote the Kucinich Grassroots Raffle (http://www.dennis4president.com/go/resources/kucinich-grassroots-raffle/). Try to sell as many tickets as you can to help promote the great prizes we are offering.
If you have any questions about the house party, conference call, or raffle, feel free to call me any time at 828-773-5338.
Thank you so much for your support. See you at the party!
--Evan
Evan Moody
Deputy Finance Director
Kucinich for President
evan@kucinich.us
For more information, visit the Kucinich House Party Center website at http://events.dennis4president.com
Sunday, October 28, 2007
The Sunday Morning Graphic Graffiti Page
THE SUNDAY MORNING
POLITICAL
GRAPHIC
GRAFFITI
PAGE
Click on the graphics for full viewing.
POLITICAL
GRAPHIC
GRAFFITI
PAGE
Click on the graphics for full viewing.
Death Of The Constitution: Follow Up and Thought Criminlals
FOLLOW UP ON THE DEATH OF THE CONSTITUTION! YOUR THOUGHTS AND WORDS ARE NOW CRIMES.
This bill violates the ultimate right of the people to overthrow our own government if it becomes oppressive. Have they read the Declaration of Independence? Now , a homegrown terrorist can now be an American who disagrees with the war…that means you and me!
Enacted into law, it will also establish a commission and a Center of Excellence to study and defeat so called thought criminals. Unlike previous anti-terror legislation, this bill specifically targets the civilian population of the United States and uses vague language to define homegrown terrorism. Duped, 404 of our elected representatives from both the Democrat and Republican parties voted in favor of this bill. There is little doubt that this bill is specifically targeting the growing patriot community that is demanding the restoration of the Constitution. First let’s take a look at the definitions of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism as defined in Section 899A of the bill.
The definition of violent radicalization uses vague language to define this term of promoting any belief system that the government considers to be an extremist agenda. Since the bill doesn’t specifically define what an extremist belief system is, it is entirely up to the interpretation of the government. Considering how much the government has done to destroy the Constitution they could even define Ron Paul supporters as promoting an extremist belief system. Literally, the government according to this definition can define whatever they want as an extremist belief system. Essentially they have defined violent radicalization as thought crime.
Welcome to “The American Police State”. H.R.1955 Download PDF
Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)
The Sponsor: The 4th wealthiest Congressman, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) net worth $172 million
Harman moves up one spot this year from No. 5 on Roll Call's 2005 list. The veteran Democrat, who serves as ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, has continued to see her net worth soar, increasing from $117.1 million in 2003, to $128 million in 2004, to $172 million now, although that dramatic rise also demonstrates the inherent weakness in the disclosure reports filed by lawmakers.
Harman's husband, Sidney Harman, is the founder of Harman International Industries, which has a current market value of $5.4 billion. The company, of which Sidney Harman owns 5.7 percent of stock worth more than $300 million at current market values, is an electronics manufacturer whose brands include AKG Acoustics, dbx, Harman Kardon and Infinity.
SEC. 2. PREVENTION OF VIOLENT RADICALIZATION AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM.
`Subtitle J--Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism
H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism ...
politics: H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown ...
Majority Whip : James E. Clyburn : The Daily WhipLine : October 23 ...
110th Congress, 1st session, House vote 993 | Congress votes ...
Statement of Chairman Bennie G. Thompson Markup: H.R. 1413, H.R. ...
One More Step Towards Fascism - Whistle Stopper Political Forums
FedNet! - Broadcast Coverage of the United States Congress
The Agonist | thoughtful, global, timely
UNO UPDATE: New World Order News Digest
The Smirking Chimp - News And Commentary from the Vast Left-Wing ...
110 Hearings: House Committee Meetings by Date (2007)
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Rummy Runs From French Rope Charges
RUMSFELD CONFRONTED WITH TORTURE CHARGES IN FRANCE!
ALL ARTICLES (Google Search:111)
Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.
US embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush's "war on terror" for six years.
Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil.
According to activists in France, who greeted Rumsfeld shouting "murderer" and "war criminal" at the breakfast meeting venue, US embassy officials remained tight-lipped about the former defense secretary's whereabouts citing "security reasons".
Anti-torture protesters in France believe that the defense secretary fled over the open border to Germany, where a war crimes case against Rumsfeld was dismissed by a federal court. But activist point out that under the Schengen1 Agreement2 that ended border checkpoints across a large part of the European3 Union4, French law enforcement agents are allowed to cross the border into Germany in pursuit of a fleeing fugitive.
"Rumsfeld must be feeling how Saddam Hussein felt when US forces were hunting him down," activist Tanguy Richard said. "He may never end up being hanged like his old friend, but he must learn that in the civilized world, war crime doesn't pay."
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights (LDH) filed the complaint on Thursday after learning that Rumsfeld was scheduled to visit Paris.
Five previous torture suits have been filed against the former US defense chief: two in Germany, one in Argentina, one in Sweden and one in Spain, the FIDH statement said.
Rumsfeld's agenda during the rest of his stay in Paris was kept under wraps for security reasons.
http://www.dedefensa.org/article.php?art_id=4552
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/oct/27/rumsfeld_and_the_taxi_to_the_darkside
http://www.taxitothedarkside.com
On Visit to France, Donald Rumsfeld Hit with Lawsuit for Ordering ...
Democracy Now, NY - 10 hours ago
This is the fifth time Rumsfeld has been charged with direct involvement in torture since 9/11. We speak with two attorneys with the plaintiffs -- Center
Donald Rumsfeld Accused of Torture While Visiting France Common Dreams (press release)
all 111 news articles »
Stephen Lendman: Torture, Occupation and Genocide
Palestine Chronicle, WA - 16 hours ago
It was also revealed that Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in overseeing the torture-interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani. He was falsely accused of being ...
What the Conventional Wisdom on Jack Goldsmith Misses
Dissident Voice, CA - Oct 13, 2007
But then came the New York Times’ seven-column blockbuster story of October 4th on CIA torture and on secret Department of Justice legal memos supporting it ...
Rumsfeld hit with torture lawsuit while visiting Paris
uruknet.info, Italy - 31 minutes ago
Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's jaunt to France was interrupted today by an unscheduled itinerary item -- he was slapped with a criminal ...
re: Viva La France
Lew Rockwell, CA - 2 hours ago
So von Rumsfeld was charged with ordering torture while visiting France. And they thought the new government was a hundred percent neocon! ...
ThinkFast: October 26, 2007
Think Progress, DC - 11 hours ago
International human rights groups have filed a lawsuit in France against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for allowing torture at detention centers ...
Under Waxman's Surveillance Washington Post
all 2 news articles »
On Visit to France, Donald Rumsfeld Hit with Lawsuit for Ordering ...
Democracy Now, NY - Oct 26, 2007
The plaintiffs include the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights. ...
Torture Complaint Filed Against Rumsfeld New York Times
Torture Complaint Filed Against Rumsfeld The Associated Press
Torture claim is filed against Rumsfeld in France International Herald Tribune
Africasia - Independent Online
all 128 news articles »
JURIST - Forum: Donald Rumsfeld: The War Crimes Case
War crimes against Rumsfeld? Ridiculous. Study history. Study international law. Actually, you don't need to do either. You don't even need be a lawyer. ...
jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/11/donald-rumsfeld-war-crimes-case.php - 47k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
JURIST - Paper Chase: Rights groups set to file Rumsfeld war ...
CCR and four Iraqi citizens initially filed [JURIST report] a war crimes complaint [English translation, PDF] in Germany against Rumsfeld and seven other ...jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/11/rights-groups-set-to-file-rumsfeld-war.php - 22k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this [ More results from jurist.law.pitt.edu
Rumsfeld Sued for Alleged War Crimes | Germany | Deutsche Welle ...
Alleging responsibility for war crimes and torture at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, a human rights group has filed a criminal complaint in Germany against US ...
www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1413907,00.html - 36k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
AlterNet: The War Crimes Case Against Donald Rumsfeld
Prosecuting a war of aggression isn't Rumsfeld's only crime. He also participated in the highest levels of decision-making that allowed the extrajudicial ...
www.alternet.org/story/44213/ - 96k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Can Bush, Rumsfeld Be Tried for War Crimes?
Will Bush, Rumsfeld Be Tried for War Crimes? by Edward Spannaus. What the United States did, on the evening of March 19, in launching a imperial,
www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3012iraq_warcrms.html - 16k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
US group files war crimes complaint in Germany against Rumsfeld ...
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may be forced to skip a major international security conference in Munich next month for fear that he could be hauled ...
www.wsws.org articles /2005/jan2005/rums -j29.shtml - 30k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Exclusive: Charges Sought Against Rumsfeld Over Prison Abuse - TIME
Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to ... of war crimes and related offenses that take place anywhere in the world. ...
www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1557842,00.html - 40k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Crimes
The crimes of the US government. ... First Bush Administration Found Guilty of War Crimes ... Rumsfeld Made Iraq Overture in '84 Despite Chemical Raids ...
www.thefourreasons.org/crimes.htm - 39k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Germany and the Rumsfeld War Crimes Lawsuit - TalkLeft: The
jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/11/donald-rumsfeld-war-crimes-case.php.
Prosecuting a war of aggression isn't Rumsfeld's only crime. ...
www.talkleft.com/story/2006/11/10/153528/ 48 - 64k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
The Center for Constitutional Rights
The CCIL provides for “universal jurisdiction” for war crimes, crimes of genocide and crimes ... Sec 5.1 Abuse of Prisoners as Torture and War Crimes-2006 ...
www.ccr-ny.org/germancase / - 28k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
TAXI TO THE DARKSIDE CONTINUED
MASTERS OF WAR DELIVERED WITH HATE!
THEIR END!
Friday, October 26, 2007
We Can All Stop Talking Now; The Constitution Is Officially Dead!
IN ANTICIPATION OF ELEVATED LEVELS OF PROTEST AND ACTIONS “IN THE STREETS ; THE HOUSE PASSES THOUGHT CRIME PREVENTION BILL.
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES IS NOW OFFICIALLY DEAD!
House Passes Thought Crime Prevention Bill
| Nay | OH-10 | Kucinich, Dennis [D] |
The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed HR 1955 titled the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 [4]. This bill is one of the most blatant attacks against the Constitution yet and actually defines thought crimes as homegrown terrorism.
If passed into law, it will also establish a commission and a Center of Excellence to study and defeat so called thought criminals. Unlike previous anti-terror legislation, this bill specifically targets the civilian population of the United States and uses vague language to define homegrown terrorism.
Amazingly, 404 of our elected representatives from both the Democrat and Republican parties voted in favor of this bill [5]. There is little doubt that this bill is specifically targeting the growing patriot community that is demanding the restoration of the Constitution.
First let’s take a look at the definitions of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism as defined in Section 899A of the bill.
The definition of violent radicalization uses vague language to define this term of promoting any belief system that the government considers to be an extremist agenda. Since the bill doesn’t specifically define what an extremist belief system is, it is entirely up to the interpretation of the government. Considering how much the government has done to destroy the Constitution they could even define Ron Paul supporters as promoting an extremist belief system. Literally, the government according to this definition can define whatever they want as an extremist belief system. Essentially they have defined violent radicalization as thought crime. The definition as defined in the bill is shown below.
`(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term `violent radicalization' means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.
`(4) While the United States must continue its vigilant efforts to combat international terrorism, it must also strengthen efforts to combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States.
`(5) Understanding the motivational factors that lead to violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence is a vital step toward eradicating these threats in the United States.
`(6) The potential rise of self radicalized, unaffiliated terrorists domestically cannot be easily prevented through traditional Federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts, and requires the incorporation of State and local solutions.
`(7) Individuals prone to violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence span all races, ethnicities, and religious beliefs, and individuals should not be targeted based solely on race, ethnicity, or religion.
`(8) Any measure taken to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence and homegrown terrorism in the United States should not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights and civil liberties of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents.
`(9) Certain governments, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have significant experience with homegrown terrorism and the United States can benefit from lessons learned by those nations.
Section 899C calls for a commission on the prevention of violent radicalization and ideologically based violence. The commission will consist of ten members appointed by various individuals that hold different positions in government. Essentially, this is a commission that will examine and report on how they are going to deal with violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism. So basically, the commission is being formed specifically on how to deal with thought criminals in the United States. The bill requires that the commission submit their final report 18 months following the commission’s first meeting as well as submit interim reports every 6 months leading up to the final report. Below is the bill’s defined purpose of the commission. Amazingly they even define one of the purposes of the commission to determine the causes of lone wolf violent radicalization.
(b) Purpose- The purposes of the Commission are the following:
`(1) Examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States, including United States connections to non-United States persons and networks, violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in prison, individual or `lone wolf' violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence, and other faces of the phenomena of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence that the Commission considers important.
`(2) Build upon and bring together the work of other entities and avoid unnecessary duplication, by reviewing the findings, conclusions, and recommendations of--
`(A) the Center of Excellence established or designated under section 899D, and other academic work, as appropriate;
`(B) Federal, State, local, or tribal studies of, reviews of, and experiences with violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence; and
`(C) foreign government studies of, reviews of, and experiences with violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence.
Section 899D of the bill establishes a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States. Essentially, this will be a Department of Homeland Security affiliated institution that will study and determine how to defeat thought criminals.
Section 899E of the bill discusses how the government is going to defeat violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism through international cooperation. As stated in the findings section earlier in the legislation, they will unquestionably seek the advice of countries with draconian police states like the United Kingdom to determine how to deal with this growing threat of thought crime.
Possibly the most ridiculous section of the bill is Section 899F which states how they plan on protecting civil rights and civil liberties while preventing ideologically based violence and homegrown terrorism. Here is what the section says.
`SEC. 899F. PROTECTING CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES WHILE PREVENTING IDEOLOGICALLY-BASED VIOLENCE AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM.
`(a) In General- The Department of Homeland Security's efforts to prevent ideologically-based violence and homegrown terrorism as described herein shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents.
`(b) Commitment to Racial Neutrality- The Secretary shall ensure that the activities and operations of the entities created by this subtitle are in compliance with the Department of Homeland Security's commitment to racial neutrality.
`(c) Auditing Mechanism- The Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer of the Department of Homeland Security will develop and implement an auditing mechanism to ensure that compliance with this subtitle does not result in a disproportionate impact, without a rational basis, on any particular race, ethnicity, or religion and include the results of its audit in its annual report to Congress required under section 705.'.
(b) Clerical Amendment- The table of contents in section 1(b) of such Act is amended by inserting at the end of the items relating to title VIII the following:
It states in the first subsection that in general the efforts to defeat thought crime shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights and civil liberties of the United States citizens and lawful permanent residents. How does this protect constitutional rights if they use vague language such as in general that prefaces the statement? This means that the Department of Homeland Security does not have to abide by the Constitution in their attempts to prevent so called homegrown terrorism.
This bill is completely insane. It literally allows the government to define any and all crimes including thought crime as violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism. Obviously, this legislation is unconstitutional on a number of levels and it is clear that all 404 representatives who voted in favor of this bill are traitors and should be removed from office immediately. The treason spans both political parties and it shows us all that there is no difference between them. The bill will go on to the Senate and will likely be passed and signed into the law by George W.Bush. Considering that draconian legislation like the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act have already been passed, there seems little question that this one will get passed as well. This is more proof that our country has been completely sold out by a group of traitors at all levels of government.
Source URL:
[link to www.thought-criminal.org]
[1] [link to www.blacklistednews.com]
[2] [link to www.blacklistednews.com]
[3] [link to www.roguegovernment.com]
[4] [link to www.govtrack.us]
[5] [link to www.govtrack.us]
"In a time of deceit telling the truth is revolutionary act." - George Orwell
Ron Fisher A Man With Integrity
RON FISHER OUR CANDIDATE WITH THE INTEGRITY TO SAY IT LIKE IT IS
IN THE NO SPIN ZONE.
THE CONNECTION NEWSPAPERS Alexandria Gazette
http://www.alexandriagazette.com/article.asp?article=89264&cat=104
Virginians Post http://www.peaceandaccountability.com
ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
By Michael Lee Pope
October 24, 2007
Discouraging Dream
Republican Mark Allen, who is vying to replace incumbent Del. David Englin (D-45), admits that he has had a difficult time on the campaign trail. After considering a run at the Democratic primary, Allen chose to take Englin on as a Republican, initiating a race that he freely acknowledges has been trying and, at times, discouraging. In a meeting with editors and reporters for this newspaper last week, Allen said that he received calls wishing for his untimely demise and arrived at his office one morning to find dog poop on his front stoop — a nasty discovery that he blamed on "immature" supporters of his opponent.
Despite the difficulties, Allen said, he has forged ahead — sure that the democratic process was worthy of his efforts. Yet he did acknowledge one thing that would make him throw in the towel.
"I had a dream that I won, and then (Alexandria Mayor) Bill Euille ran against me," Allen said. "I don’t think I’d file for re-election if that happened."
No Calls, Please
Although his campaign last year for School Board was unsuccessful, Sanford Horn has remained an important part of the political scene in Alexandria. Earlier this week, he moderated a debate at Agudas Achim featuring several contested races for the House of Delegates and the chairmanship of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. Knowing that it was important moment for the candidates and the voters, Horn wanted to make sure he approached the forum with the amount of respect it required — unlike a certain presidential candidate who answered a telephone call from his wife in the middle of a speech to the National Rifle Association.
"Let me make sure my cell phone is turned off," he said, fishing through his pockets. "I don’t want to pull a Rudy Giuliani here."
Constituent Forbearers
As one of the three Jewish members of Virginia’s House of Delegates, Del. Adam Ebbin (D-49) feels that he holds a tremendous responsibility to represent his constituents and his ancestors. During a candidate forum in Alexandria earlier this week, Ebbin explained how the duty is one that he thinks about frequently.
"A lot of the House members have the wristbands, you’ve probably seen them, that say, ‘What would Jesus do?’" Ebbin said. "I’ve often thought that I need one that says ‘What would Rabbi Hillel do?’ — or, better yet, ‘What would my grandparents do?’"
THE IMPEACHMENT CAMPAIGN
The Ebbin-Fisher race is more than a little lopsided, with Ebbin raising $114,000 compared to Fisher’s very modest fundraising total of $450.
Fisher said he has no specific disagreement with anything that Ebbin has done in office. The point of his campaign, as he has explained at a number of candidate forums over the past few weeks, is to seek the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and an immediate withdraw of troops from Iraq.
"The House of Delegates could pass resolutions encouraging impeachments and withdraw, and I would work to make that happen if elected," said the long-shot candidate before one forum earlier this month. "The truth is that I’m not running against Adam so much as I am running for peace and accountability
CAPTAIN OF THE SHIP
RON FISHER WANTS TO PUT HIS NAVAL LEADERSHIP SKILLS TO USE IN RICHMOND.
By David Schultz
October 24, 2007
Ron Fisher
Party: Independent Green
Age: 72
Birthplace: Bemis, Tenn.
Family: Wife, four sons & two stepchildren
Occupation: Retired
Phone contact:
Ron Fisher a first-time House of Delegates candidate is chock full of thoughts and opinions that spew forth almost faster than his mouth can expel them.
Illegal immigration?
"Immigrants are here… They’re not here to steal money. They’re here because we’re dumping corn and wheat down in Mexico."
Criminal justice?
"I’ve been strong against the death penalty forever. We’re spending $5 to 10 million to execute. You can keep them in jail for one tenth of that."
And the Iraq War:
"We need to bring our National Guard home and get the U.N. in there. Every bullet fired over there is a war crime. That’s the only way to describe it."
Fisher, a longtime Arlington resident and a retired Navy Captain, is using his candidacy as a platform to weigh in on all the pressing issues of the day such as abusive driver fees ("just a cheap shot"), predatory lenders ("The usury rates are rampant here") and overzealous judges ("They tried to give me a $2,500 fine for being on my own property").
Those opinions may be controversial, but what Fisher lacks in diplomacy, he more than makes up for in confidence.
"With my experience and skills, I can lead this thing out of some of this morass," Fisher said. "They need someone like me down there [in Richmond]."
IF FISHER WERE elected, he would bring his General Assembly colleagues the viewpoints and experience of nearly 30 years in the military. As a Navy Captain, he made 15 patrols and worked in a naval shipyard. "They’re known for being lazy and not doing their job but I had a hell of a great time there," he recalled. "We did some amazing things."
"He spent close to 30 years in the Navy," said Greg Wiezerbicki, who is involved in the group Veterans For Peace with Fisher. "That speaks quite highly of anyone’s leadership skills."
Fisher is also an expert on nuclear submarine technology and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in the same class as U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), with whom he has remained friends ever since.
A lifelong Republican, Fisher worked on McCain’s presidential campaign in 1999, which he eventually lost to George W. Bush.
But a few years after Bush’s first inauguration, Fisher became disillusioned and left the Republican Party. According to him, the Republicans were the ones who left him.
"These guys aren’t even close to being [real] Republicans," he said. "I realized Bush was not qualified to be president early on."
THIS YEAR, Fisher is running for the House of Delegates seat in the 49th district, which stretches from northern Alexandria through South Arlington and into Fairfax County, on the ticket of the Independent Green Party.
Not to be confused with the Green Party of Ralph Nader fame, the Independent Green Party is localized in Virginia and is fielding several dozen candidates for local and state offices this year.
The Independent Greens are a loosely affiliated group with few overarching principles other than the expansion of rail transportation across the country and the belief that running for public office is a victory in itself.
Fisher said that he decided to run his first campaign as an Independent Green because he liked the wide latitude the party granted him.
"They are independent," he said. "They don’t tell me how I have to vote or what I have to do."
Fisher’s party is enamored of him as well. Carey Campbell, the state chairman of the Independent Green Party, called Fisher "an American hero" and "a brilliant man."
"He’s an energetic, passionate voice in the community for what’s right and good," Campbell said.
How did you get involved in politics?
When I retired [from the Navy] in 1984 I saw a real need for some change and reform and education… I got interested in [politics] when I went through the court system for a divorce. I’m probably [in the] one percent of the people in this state who knows how judges are elected. I’m [also] a good friend of [U.S. Sen.] John McCain’s (R-Ariz.). We graduated in the same company and went to Europe together. When he started running for office [in 1999], I really thought he would be a fantastic president. I was [his] chairman in Northern Virginia and I really started it… I see McCain at different events. He’s way too much pro-war for me but he’s still a great friend… After the McCain thing, I’ve really borne down on it.
What is the biggest issue facing Virginia right now?
I will talk about a number of issues. The critical thing for me is back to getting the money that’s going into these dumb weapons systems. Affordable housing is really a critical issue. We’re losing housing instead of gaining it here. That’s tied in closely with the traffic. There’s no Metro stops in the whole [49th House of Delegates] district. It’s gerrymandered… We need a single payer health care system… Do we have enough money for transportation? I don’t really know if it’s enough but I do know that they’re spending it on the wrong thing. The idea is to listen to the people and do these things…
If elected, what would be your first priority when you go down to Richmond?
I would be looking at every place they’re spending money. I’m going to try to do this before the election. I want people to see where we’re spending it. We have to figure out a way to get people employed. Some people didn’t have the opportunities that I’ve had. With cleaning these streams and getting ready for global warming, there’s plenty of work to be done.
What is one area in which you feel your opponent [Del. Adam Ebbin (D-49)] made a mistake?
One that Ebbin and I would agree on was the marriage amendment that went into the Bill of Rights. They’re taking away rights and putting it into the Bill of Rights. He fought against that… [Also Ebbin] said "I’m against the war." I’m not picking on him, but I think they all ought to be marching in these marches and standing on the street corners.
SUPPORT RON FISHER; BELIEVE IT OR NOT INTEGRITY STILL MATTERS.
Monday, October 22, 2007
CLINTON BUCKS THE TREND AND RAKES IN CASH FROM THE US WEAPONS INDUSTRY
CLINTON BUCKS THE TREND AND RAKES IN CASH FROM THE US WEAPONS INDUSTRY: THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT WE DON’T NEED OR WANT FROM OUR PARTY!
I DON’T CARE WHO IT IS IN OUR PARTY. IF THEY TAKE THIS KIND OF MONEY THEY ARE GOING TO GET THIS AWARD!
By Leonard Doyle in Washington Published: 19 October 2007
The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican Party. Mrs. Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street's favorite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favorite, Barack Obama.
Mrs. Clinton's wooing of the defense industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between Bill Clinton and the military during his presidency. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defense industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defense contracts.
Employees of the top five US arms manufacturers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to the Republicans. "The contributions clearly suggest the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed," said Thomas Edsall, an academic at Columbia University in New York.
Republican administrations are by tradition much stronger supporters of US armaments programmers and Pentagon spending plans than Democratic governments. Relations between the arms industry and Bill Clinton soured when he slimmed down the military after the end of the Cold War. His wife, however, has been careful not to make the same mistake.
After her election to the Senate, she became the first New York senator on the armed services committee, where she revealed her hawkish tendencies by supporting the invasion of Iraq. Although she now favors a withdrawal of US troops, her position on Iran is among the most warlike of all the candidates – Democrat or Republican.
This week, she said that, if elected president, she would not rule out military strikes to destroy Tehran's nuclear weapons facilities.
While on the armed services committee, Mrs. Clinton has befriended key generals and has won the endorsement of General Wesley Clarke, who ran NATO’s war in Kosovo. A former presidential candidate himself, he is spoken of as a potential vice-presidential running mate.
Mrs. Clinton has been a regular visitor to Iraq and Afghanistan and is careful to focus her criticisms of the Iraq war on President Bush, rather than the military. The arms industry has duly taken note.
So far, Mrs. Clinton has received $52,600 in contributions from individual arms industry employees. That is more than half the sum given to all Democrats and 60 per cent of the total going to Republican candidates. Election fundraising laws ban individuals from donating more than $4,600 but contributions are often "bundled" to obtain influence over a candidate.
The arms industry has even deserted the biggest supporter of the Iraq war, Senator John McCain, who is also a member of the armed services committee and a decorated Vietnam War veteran. He has been only $19,200.
By Leonard Doyle in Washington Published: 19 October 2007
The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican Party. Mrs. Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street's favorite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favorite, Barack Obama.
Mrs. Clinton's wooing of the defense industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between Bill Clinton and the military during his presidency. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defense industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defense contracts.
Employees of the top five US arms manufacturers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to the Republicans. "The contributions clearly suggest the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed," said Thomas Edsall, an academic at Columbia University in New York.
Republican administrations are by tradition much stronger supporters of US armaments programmers and Pentagon spending plans than Democratic governments. Relations between the arms industry and Bill Clinton soured when he slimmed down the military after the end of the Cold War. His wife, however, has been careful not to make the same mistake.
After her election to the Senate, she became the first New York senator on the armed services committee, where she revealed her hawkish tendencies by supporting the invasion of Iraq. Although she now favors a withdrawal of US troops, her position on Iran is among the most warlike of all the candidates – Democrat or Republican.
This week, she said that, if elected president, she would not rule out military strikes to destroy Tehran's nuclear weapons facilities.
While on the armed services committee, Mrs. Clinton has befriended key generals and has won the endorsement of General Wesley Clarke, who ran NATO’s war in Kosovo. A former presidential candidate himself, he is spoken of as a potential vice-presidential running mate.
Mrs. Clinton has been a regular visitor to Iraq and Afghanistan and is careful to focus her criticisms of the Iraq war on President Bush, rather than the military. The arms industry has duly taken note.
So far, Mrs. Clinton has received $52,600 in contributions from individual arms industry employees. That is more than half the sum given to all Democrats and 60 per cent of the total going to Republican candidates. Election fundraising laws ban individuals from donating more than $4,600 but contributions are often "bundled" to obtain influence over a candidate.
The arms industry has even deserted the biggest supporter of the Iraq war, Senator John McCain, who is also a member of the armed services committee and a decorated Vietnam War veteran. He has been only $19,200.
Weapons-makers are equally unimpressed by the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Despite a campaign built largely around the need for an aggressive US military and a determination to stay the course in Iraq, he is behind Mrs. Clinton in the affections of arms executives.
Mr. Giuliani may be suffering because of his strong association with the failed policies of President Bush and the fact he is he is known as a social liberal.
Mrs. Clinton's closest competitor in raising cash from the arms industry is the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who raised just $32,000.
"Arms industry profits are so heavily dependent on government contracts that companies in this field want to be sure they do not have hostile relations with the White House," added Mr. Edsall.
The industry's strong support for Mrs. Clinton indicates that she is their firm favorite to win the Democratic nomination in the spring and the presidential election in November 2008. In the last presidential race, George Bush raised more than $800,000 – twice the sum collected by his Democratic rival John Kerry.
Mr. Edsall's analysis of the figures reveals that, over the past 10 years, the defense industry has favored Republicans over Democrats by a 3-2 margin, making Mrs. Clinton's position even more remarkable.
Mrs. Clinton's closest competitor in raising cash from the arms industry is the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who raised just $32,000.
"Arms industry profits are so heavily dependent on government contracts that companies in this field want to be sure they do not have hostile relations with the White House," added Mr. Edsall.
The industry's strong support for Mrs. Clinton indicates that she is their firm favorite to win the Democratic nomination in the spring and the presidential election in November 2008. In the last presidential race, George Bush raised more than $800,000 – twice the sum collected by his Democratic rival John Kerry.
Mr. Edsall's analysis of the figures reveals that, over the past 10 years, the defense industry has favored Republicans over Democrats by a 3-2 margin, making Mrs. Clinton's position even more remarkable.
A Little Help For Dennis Please
SUPPORT DENNIS ON THIS ONE. IT’S THE LEAST WE CAN DO.
Dear Democracy for America members,
I am writing to you to ask you for your support because you, as much or more than any group of voters in this nation, recognize the real issues confronting our country, the real solutions, and the shortcomings and failures of many of our political leaders in addressing them.
I know that many of you agree with me that half measures, compromises, misguided thinking and hollow rhetoric are not the answers. They are symptomatic of the problems, and, to a regrettable extent, the causes of the problems.
That's why we are in a war, and why we're moving ever closer to another. That's why our Constitutional rights and protections are being violated every day. Why 47 millions Americans are uninsured and another 50 million are under-insured. Why millions of American jobs have been outsourced. And every other issue that we, as progressive and independent-thinking Democrats stand for is pushed aside.
DFA members have the power to change that by supporting the one and only candidate who isn't afraid to say what he believes - what you believe - and who won't back down.
Ending the war and preventing the next one
I am the only Democratic presidential candidate who campaigned against and voted against the war authorization resolution in 2002 and every supplemental appropriation since. Five years ago, I presented evidence to my colleagues in the House and Senate based on my own intelligence analysis which showed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not a direct threat to the U.S. or our allies. I shared that analysis with my Congressional colleagues and rallied more than 120 members to vote against the authorization.
The defense offered by other candidates - "If I knew then what I know now" - is a feeble excuse for making the wrong decision when it mattered most to make the right decision. Many of us did know then because we weren't tricked or bullied by the White House. We knew it was wrong, and we knew the consequences. So did you.
But what makes the newfound anti-war claims of some other candidates even more indefensible is that they voted to continue funding the war, year after year, at least until their Presidential campaigns began. It's simply not enough to say you oppose the war now when you continued to fund it time and time again.
Right now, the war is fully funded until early next year. There is more than enough money available to bring all of our troops and equipment home within a few months, but the Congressional leadership is unwilling to challenge the President.
My plan, embodied in HR 1234, would end the war, end the occupation, establish an international security and peacekeeping force, begin the process of reconciliation, and provide the kind of support needed for reconstruction.
My target is not 2013. My target is three months after taking office.
But in the meantime, we in the Congress, with your support, must use every means at our disposal to force the White House to act now to bring our troops home. And, we must use every means at our disposal to stop the White House from launching a new war on Iran with the same flimsy, deceptive and outright fraudulent claims it used five years ago.
After failing to deliver what it promised in last year's election, the Democratic leadership has a moral obligation, overdue, to live up to its word to the American people. Please cast your vote:
http://DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
Empowering Constitutional abuses, and ending them
I am the only Democrat running for President who voted against the unconstitutional and illegal U.S.A Patriot Act. The other candidates were wrong then, and various federal court rulings have made that abundantly clear. We can't condone the shredding of our Constitution in the name of "national security." And we can't support leaders, candidates or policies that do. Please cast your vote:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
True "universal health care"
I am the only Presidential candidate who supports a truly universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care system to cover all Americans. Every other plan preserves, and in some cases, enhances the role of private, for-profit insurance companies that make their billions by not providing coverage.
Forcing Americans to buy private insurance denies the moral obligation of this nation to provide coverage for its citizens. Any scheme that provides subsidies or other financial incentives to for-profit providers to make coverage less expensive or more accessible is just that: a scheme. It further enriches the insurers, at taxpayers' expense, and would still not guarantee full coverage or universal availability.
Michael Moore has endorsed my health care plan (HR 676), as have thousands of physicians, nurses, and labor union members. It's time to catch up to the rest of the industrialized nations and declare that health care is a right, not a commodity that some people can afford and others can't. No other candidate is willing to take on those insurance companies. I am. And I believe that you are, too. Please cast your vote:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
Marriage equality
I am the only candidate running for president who supports full marriage equality. I believe marriage equality is a defining issue for the 21st century. Any two people who love each other should not be denied the right to share their love with each other. The other candidates disagree. Once again, they are wrong.
If we don't stand up for this issue - vote our hearts and our consciences - the Democratic Party and the Democratic candidates will continue to ignore the issue of marriage equality and continue falling back on "civil unions" as a more "acceptable" alternative. It is not acceptable. You know it, and I know it. Please cast your vote:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
Impeachment
I am only the presidential candidate willing to demand the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. Every pair of DFA eyes reading this e-mail knows that this President and this Vice President have committed serious crimes worthy of impeachment. This it not a personal attack against the Vice President.
It is about the sanctity of the Constitution. This democracy must be protected against leaders who have no regard for the Constitution or the rule of law. The mechanism for taking action against such leaders is impeachment. We, the people, have not only the right but the obligation to stop this. HR 333, which I introduced, is the appropriate recourse under the law to hold those leaders accountable and answerable.
Again, the Congressional leadership and the other candidates are unwilling to take the kind of action that our Constitution, our laws, and our beliefs demand that we take. And again, they are wrong. Please cast your vote:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
My candidacy for President of the United States is about who we are as Americans. It is about who we are as Democrats. It is about who we are as progressives. There are clear distinctions between my friends in this race and me -- major differences on every issue of importance to me and to you.
I stand proudly for my core beliefs. Only if you and others with the courage to hold the Party and its candidates accountable will we be able to make progress on a real agenda for real change in this nation. And by doing what's right, all of us together, we can send a proud and powerful message that we know what - and who - is wrong. And, very simply, we've had enough.
For more information on my record, please visit my website -- I want DFA members to have direct and constant contact with my campaign. I urge you at any time to reach out to our campaign's national field director, Vin Gopal, by e-mailing him at vin.gopal(at)kucinich.us
I hope to earn your vote in this very important presidential poll.
Please cast your vote today:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
Sincerely,
Dennis Kucinich
DFA members have the power to change that by supporting the one and only candidate who isn't afraid to say what he believes - what you believe - and who won't back down.
Ending the war and preventing the next one
I am the only Democratic presidential candidate who campaigned against and voted against the war authorization resolution in 2002 and every supplemental appropriation since. Five years ago, I presented evidence to my colleagues in the House and Senate based on my own intelligence analysis which showed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not a direct threat to the U.S. or our allies. I shared that analysis with my Congressional colleagues and rallied more than 120 members to vote against the authorization.
The defense offered by other candidates - "If I knew then what I know now" - is a feeble excuse for making the wrong decision when it mattered most to make the right decision. Many of us did know then because we weren't tricked or bullied by the White House. We knew it was wrong, and we knew the consequences. So did you.
But what makes the newfound anti-war claims of some other candidates even more indefensible is that they voted to continue funding the war, year after year, at least until their Presidential campaigns began. It's simply not enough to say you oppose the war now when you continued to fund it time and time again.
Right now, the war is fully funded until early next year. There is more than enough money available to bring all of our troops and equipment home within a few months, but the Congressional leadership is unwilling to challenge the President.
My plan, embodied in HR 1234, would end the war, end the occupation, establish an international security and peacekeeping force, begin the process of reconciliation, and provide the kind of support needed for reconstruction.
My target is not 2013. My target is three months after taking office.
But in the meantime, we in the Congress, with your support, must use every means at our disposal to force the White House to act now to bring our troops home. And, we must use every means at our disposal to stop the White House from launching a new war on Iran with the same flimsy, deceptive and outright fraudulent claims it used five years ago.
After failing to deliver what it promised in last year's election, the Democratic leadership has a moral obligation, overdue, to live up to its word to the American people. Please cast your vote:
http://DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
Empowering Constitutional abuses, and ending them
I am the only Democrat running for President who voted against the unconstitutional and illegal U.S.A Patriot Act. The other candidates were wrong then, and various federal court rulings have made that abundantly clear. We can't condone the shredding of our Constitution in the name of "national security." And we can't support leaders, candidates or policies that do. Please cast your vote:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
True "universal health care"
I am the only Presidential candidate who supports a truly universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care system to cover all Americans. Every other plan preserves, and in some cases, enhances the role of private, for-profit insurance companies that make their billions by not providing coverage.
Forcing Americans to buy private insurance denies the moral obligation of this nation to provide coverage for its citizens. Any scheme that provides subsidies or other financial incentives to for-profit providers to make coverage less expensive or more accessible is just that: a scheme. It further enriches the insurers, at taxpayers' expense, and would still not guarantee full coverage or universal availability.
Michael Moore has endorsed my health care plan (HR 676), as have thousands of physicians, nurses, and labor union members. It's time to catch up to the rest of the industrialized nations and declare that health care is a right, not a commodity that some people can afford and others can't. No other candidate is willing to take on those insurance companies. I am. And I believe that you are, too. Please cast your vote:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
Marriage equality
I am the only candidate running for president who supports full marriage equality. I believe marriage equality is a defining issue for the 21st century. Any two people who love each other should not be denied the right to share their love with each other. The other candidates disagree. Once again, they are wrong.
If we don't stand up for this issue - vote our hearts and our consciences - the Democratic Party and the Democratic candidates will continue to ignore the issue of marriage equality and continue falling back on "civil unions" as a more "acceptable" alternative. It is not acceptable. You know it, and I know it. Please cast your vote:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
Impeachment
I am only the presidential candidate willing to demand the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. Every pair of DFA eyes reading this e-mail knows that this President and this Vice President have committed serious crimes worthy of impeachment. This it not a personal attack against the Vice President.
It is about the sanctity of the Constitution. This democracy must be protected against leaders who have no regard for the Constitution or the rule of law. The mechanism for taking action against such leaders is impeachment. We, the people, have not only the right but the obligation to stop this. HR 333, which I introduced, is the appropriate recourse under the law to hold those leaders accountable and answerable.
Again, the Congressional leadership and the other candidates are unwilling to take the kind of action that our Constitution, our laws, and our beliefs demand that we take. And again, they are wrong. Please cast your vote:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
My candidacy for President of the United States is about who we are as Americans. It is about who we are as Democrats. It is about who we are as progressives. There are clear distinctions between my friends in this race and me -- major differences on every issue of importance to me and to you.
I stand proudly for my core beliefs. Only if you and others with the courage to hold the Party and its candidates accountable will we be able to make progress on a real agenda for real change in this nation. And by doing what's right, all of us together, we can send a proud and powerful message that we know what - and who - is wrong. And, very simply, we've had enough.
For more information on my record, please visit my website -- I want DFA members to have direct and constant contact with my campaign. I urge you at any time to reach out to our campaign's national field director, Vin Gopal, by e-mailing him at vin.gopal(at)kucinich.us
I hope to earn your vote in this very important presidential poll.
Please cast your vote today:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/VoteKucinich
Sincerely,
Dennis Kucinich
THE REIGN OF GEORGE BUSH MUST END!
Like an Alcoholic; This Nation Is On The Way To The Bottom,
And We Know
What The Road Back To The Restoration Of This Nation Will Be Like, Whether Anyone
Is Willing
To Step Out
Of Their
Fog Of
Denial
Or Not!
AND IF YOU CAN’T FIGURE THIS OUT;
YOU ARE IN SEVERE DENIAL…
THESE BOYS DON’T PRACTICE
SABER RATTLING;
THEY BLOW HEADS OFF!
CHENEY, LIKE PRESIDENT, HAS A WARNING FOR IRAN
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: October 22, 2007
CHENEY, LIKE PRESIDENT, HAS A WARNING FOR IRAN
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: October 22, 2007
LANDSDOWNE, Va., Oct. 21 — Vice President Dick Cheney issued a pointed warning to Iran on Sunday, calling the government in Tehran “a growing obstacle to peace in the Middle East” and promising “serious consequences” if the government there does not abandon its nuclear program.
The remarks, just days after President Bush suggested that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III,” amounted to Part II of a one-two punch from the administration at a moment when it is trying to persuade its allies in Europe to impose stiffer sanctions on Tehran. Those efforts grew more complicated on Saturday when Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator resigned on the eve of crucial talks with Europe.
“The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences,” Mr. Cheney said, without specifying what those might be. “The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
Mr. Cheney delivered his warnings during a wide-ranging foreign policy speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research organization. During the 35-minute talk, he also took aim at Syria, accusing Damascus of using “bribery and intimidation” to influence the coming elections in Lebanon, and he presented the case for the administration’s muscular approach to investigating suspected terrorists.
But Mr. Cheney reserved his harshest language for Iran. Calling it “the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism,” he said, “our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its most aggressive ambitions.”
That language is not radically different from what Mr. Cheney has used in the past. But people at the conference said that, placed in the context of Mr. Bush’s remarks, it represented a significant step toward increasing pressure on Iran. The speech seemed to lay the groundwork for the threat of military action — either because the administration actually intends to use force or because it wants to use the threat of force to prod Europe into action.
“This week we heard a significant ratcheting up of the rhetoric,” said Dennis Ross, who served as a Middle East envoy for President Clinton and the first President Bush and is now a scholar at the Washington Institute. Repeating Mr. Cheney’s remark about serious consequences, he said those were “strong words” with “serious implications.”
Mr. Bush has repeatedly said the administration would not “tolerate” a nuclear-armed Iran. But during a news conference on Wednesday, the president went further, saying of Iran: “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”
That distinction — having the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon, as opposed to actually having a weapon — is one the administration has not made in the past. David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute who moderated a panel discussion before and after Mr. Cheney’s speech, said the vice president also seemed to draw a new red line when, instead of saying it is “not acceptable” for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, he said the world “will not allow” it.
“The first is a condition,” Mr. Makovsky said. “The second is a commitment.”
In an interview on Friday, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, made it clear that he thought immediate attacks inside Iran would be a bad idea, while warning Tehran not to “mistake restraint for lack of commitment or lack of concern or lack of capability.”
The United Nations Security Council has already imposed sanctions on Iran and called on the government in Tehran to abandon its program to enrich uranium, and Iran has defied those sanctions. Now the United States is beginning to examine even tougher economic penalties, including a far broader cutoff of bank lending and technology to Iran than in the past.
Since 2005, Iran has taken a two-pronged approach toward the West, allowing its chief negotiator, Ali Larijani, to engage in talks with Europe and the International Atomic Energy Agency while the country’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says there is no room to negotiate. Mr. Larijani has been viewed as more moderate than Mr. Ahmadinejad. Mr. Larijani resigned Saturday and is being replaced by more of a hard-liner.
The Bush administration, for its part, seems to be making an appeal directly to the Iranian people in the hope that they will rise up against the Ahmadinejad government. The White House wants to avoid any perception that it would use military force to bring about a change in government but has made clear that it would be only too happy if the Iranians brought it about themselves.
Mr. Bush said Wednesday that he intended to continue to pursue a policy of isolating Iran with the hope that “at some point in time, somebody else shows up and says it’s not worth the isolation.”
Mr. Cheney echoed that theme. “The spirit of freedom is stirring in Iran,” he said, adding, “America looks forward to the day when Iranians reclaim their destiny, the day that our two countries, as free and democratic nations, can be the closest of friends.”
Cheney added that Iran's attempts to secure technology with the aim of building nuclear weapons are obvious, and the U.S. and other countries are prepared to take action -- although he didn't specify whether that meant military action.
"We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,'' he said.
On Saturday, Gen. Mahmoud Chaharbaghi, a commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, said his country could fire 11,000 rockets in a single minute if attacked.
"Enemy bases and positions have been identified. ... The Guards ground force will fire 11,000 rockets into identified enemy positions within the first minute of any aggression against the Iranian territory," he told state-run television.
He did not give details on which enemy positions he was referring to, but it was widely assumed the commander meant nearby U.S. military installations and Israel.
The U.S. has 40,000 troops in various Persian Gulf countries, and another 20,000 stations in Mideast waters, according to The Associated Press.
A further 160,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq and 25,000 in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Ephraim Sneh, a former senior Israeli defence official, said Israel's vulnerability to a rocket attack should not be understated.
"They already have the long-range ballistic missiles to deliver a nuclear bomb, and in a couple of years they might have it," he said.
Israel has repeatedly accused Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons, while Iran has maintained its program is only for peaceful purposes, like generating energy.
Earlier this month, Israeli jets attacked a target deep within Syrian territory. Israel claimed it had struck a suspected nuclear facility built with the support of Iran and North Korea.
But Syria alleges Israel only bombed an empty building, and officials took reporters to the site.
Iran is sending officials to Rome on Tuesday to attend talks with the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, to discuss its nuclear program.
One of those officials is Ali Larijani, who resigned as Iran's top nuclear negotiator. His successor, Saeed Jalili, will also attend.
"Based on the supreme leader's and president's suggestion, Mr. Larijani, alongside Mr. Jalili, will attend the negotiation with Solana on Tuesday," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters.
AFP The Associated Press all 569 news articles »
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Wake Up; Face The Facts; Decide If You Really Want To Take Back America or Just Complain About Losing It!
THOMAS JEFFERSON SAID: “EVERY GENERATION NEEDS A NEW REVOLUTION.” WE ARE LONG OVERDUE.
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. --George Bernard Shaw
BROKEN LIKE WILD STALLIONS“We are puppets, one and all, our attached strings easily maneuvered, our brainwashed minds easily controlled. Too many years of accumulated televised propaganda, too many years of control and manipulation by our schools and corporate media have made us immune to the spirit of rage and the power of the People present in other regions of the world but sorely extinct here.
We have been inoculated with acquiescence and passivity, becoming humans living in a vegetative state incapable of rising up, conditioned to believe in the greatness of government and its lawmakers, trained well to obey laws and rules even when they favor those in power and when they fail to seek justice and equality, even as corporations and the government rape and pillage our ways of life, even as the future of our children is put in grave danger more and more each day we fail to act.
The System has worked its magic, and comatose drones living mechanical lives have we been bred to become, from the cradle to the grave, swimming in a cocktail of complacency, indifference, passivity and conformism.
The evidence of this is enveloping, it is all around us. Our failure to rise up as one giant energy, millions strong, seeking accountability and justice, searching for a government no longer serving the needs of the People, demanding the end to corporate rule, forcing change in policy and direction and putting an end to the criminal nature of our politicians is proof that our human spirit has been extinguished, our will to fight extinct.
Today, in spite of massive, overwhelming and accumulating evidence of election fraud, in spite of being lied and led into illegal war and criminal mass murder, in spite of the miserable failure of our leaders, in spite of the likely road to totalitarianism we seem headed towards and in spite of the profound danger Bush has and continues to place us in we continue to live life not caring, not knowing and not interested.
Today, in spite of massive, overwhelming and accumulating evidence of election fraud, in spite of being lied and led into illegal war and criminal mass murder, in spite of the miserable failure of our leaders, in spite of the likely road to totalitarianism we seem headed towards and in spite of the profound danger Bush has and continues to place us in we continue to live life not caring, not knowing and not interested.
We have been tamed, like a wild stallion, broken, saddled and corralled, robbed of the freedom to roam America’s plains, now faithful and obedient to our wicked masters, unwilling to take action, unwilling to resist and revolt, much like the Declaration of Independence asks us to do in times of tyranny, instead complacent in life, entertained by bread and circus, uncaring for our future, ignorant to our present, blind to the destruction of America being perpetrated by those in power. We are like zoo animals, encaged, depressed, controlled, conditioned, defeated.
The flame inside us has disappeared, replaced by a cold and dark void, even as we witness firsthand the arrival of fascism and the death of democracy, even as we are witness to the end of freedom and rights and the extinction of the land once known as America. “
I think the members of the Virginian Group, of which I am a member, are in agreement that we have an Executive Branch of our government that has risen to the level of an Imperial Presidency; that the Legislative Branch has been rendered impotent to the point where it is effectively meaningless; that the Supreme Court can render no decision that the President must obey.
The Constitution has been swept aside as obsolete and has no relevance in the conduct of our government. There is no law that Executive Branch will either honor or obey if it is an impediment to its agenda.
We are faced with the most serious perversion of government in this nation’s history; a government prepared to do whatever it wills confident that there is no one, no law, no instrumentality of the American System that can stop them. They will do whatever they please until some one stops them.
We are in agreement that the very mechanisms of redress, correction and restoration inherent of The Constitution, and extant in our minds, products of our education, life experiences and expectations as Americans are no longer available to “We The People”; our system of government is a pretense serving only those people and powers that benefit from its existence and its ability to dole out power, privilege and our IRS Tribute.
We who find our government to have failed ask just what are Americans willing to do take back control of government; what are we willing to do ensure a future of liberty and freedom in this land?
In a most unusual move on this blog; I am going to introduce you to a Conservative voice you be unaware of, and present his view, in full and uninterrupted as regards the topic:
AMERICA: THE DEATH OF AMERICAN EMPIRE
FROM TAKI’S TOP DRAWER: About Taki
On February 5, 2007, journalist and socialite Taki Theodoracopulos launched Taki’s Top Drawer, (www.takimag.com), a conservative online magazine. Taki writes a column, the “High Life,” which has appeared in London’s The Spectator for the past twenty-five years.
He writes also for National Review, the Sunday Times (London), Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Quest, among others. In 2002, Taki founded The American Conservative magazine with Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell. Taki is a descendant of a titled family from the Ionian island of Zante.
His father was a self-made shipping magnate who served in both the Greek armed forces during the World War II Balkan campaign of 1940-1941 and the anti-German resistance movement. Taki was educated at the Lawrenceville School and the University of Virginia, and is married to Princess Alexandra Schoenburg.
Why start this new online magazine? According to the just-turned-70 writer—who’s fit as a fiddle, and active in competitive martial arts—“I want to shake up the stodgy world of so-called ‘conservative’ opinion.
For the past ten years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow-ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in gothic dormitories, while sipping port and smoking their father’s stolen cigars.
Thanks to the tragedy of September 11—and a compliant and dim-witted president—these kids got the chance to play Risk with real soldiers, with American soldiers. Patriotic men and women are dying over in Iraq for a war that was never in America’s interests.
And now these spitball gunners, these chicken hawks, want to attack Iran—which is no threat to the U.S. at all. One thing I can tell you for sure, there may well be some atheists in foxholes—but you’ll never find a neocon.
They prefer to send blue-collar kids out to die on their behalf, so they get to feel macho—and make up for all the times they got wedgies in prep school. It shall be our considered task to take on the chicken-hawks of this world, and give them wedgies again.”
Writers for this site will include conservative and libertarian luminaries like Paul Gottfried, R.J. Stove, Justin Raimondo, Steven Sailer, John Zmirak, Scott Richert and many others.
“We want to reflect a traditional conservatism that prefers peace with honor to proxy wars, Western civilization to multicultural barbarism, Christendom to the European Union, and Russell Kirk to Leon Trotsky.
This will undoubtedly infuriate many in the mainstream ‘conservative’ movement, who have transferred their loyalties elsewhere.
It’s time to raise their blood pressure a few points—and help them burn off some of those five-course meals they’ve been eating down on K Street,” Taki said.
The Death Of American Empire Posted by Patrick Foy on June 12, 2007
Step back and look at the big picture. The farther you step back, the bigger the picture gets. Step back too far, and the world becomes a reduction ad absurdum, resulting in a kind of Buddhism.
My departed friend Charles Bukowski wrote in one of his many poems, “We cannot acquire too much...there are laws we know nothing of.”
What prompts this avenue of thought is a gloomy editorial not too long ago in Capitol Hill Blue by its founder, Doug Thompson, out of Washington, D.C. Every once in a while, like some of us, Thompson seems to nosedive into a depression.
The title of his article ( March 9th, 2007) indicates as much: “Turn off the life support: America is dead”. Here’s a sample:
Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to pull the plug on this failed democratic republic called The United States of America. Turn off the life support. Disconnect the IVs. The US of A is brain dead with no chance for revival....
It doesn’t matter who controls Congress. Congress is a dead institution, ruled by timid legislators who no longer exercise any real role in the governing of this nation. It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court may or may not do. The President of the United States has declared himself a “war time President” and granted himself dictatorial rights that no one in Congress or the Court appears able to successfully challenge him....
We need to rethink this experiment called America. Maybe we need to start with a clean sheet of paper.... Maybe it’s time for a new American Revolution. After all, the last one started because another guy named George tried to destroy our way of life.
All of this may be accurate, but it is too idealistic. [In fact, in the interim, Thompson has toned down the article, removing some of what has just been quoted.] We do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world of the possible, the tolerable, and/or the just barely manageable. We cannot go back to the dream of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic or to its original Constitution. To attempt to halt the present day free-for-all in America and begin anew would likely make matters worse, opening the door to greater demagoguery and perhaps complete chaos.
The truth is, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. It is long gone, and nobody is particularly concerned. That optimistic framework of self-governance and independence was rendered irrelevant by the Civil War (a.k.a. The War of Northern Aggression) which lasted from 1861 to 1865. The legitimate issue of slavery aside, when half the country invades, pillages, ransacks and subjugates the other half, that event can in no way be indicative of the rule of law, and was certainly not authorized by the Constitution.
The Civil War marked the end of the American Republic of 1789.
We live in the aftermath, a postscript; we are making it up as we go along. Many wonderful and fantastic achievements have occurred during this aftermath--in the realm of inventions, science, entertainment, industry, space exploration, the arts, business, etcetera--for which Americans can justly be proud.
But many terrible things have happened as well, mostly in the governmental sector, for which Washington must take the blame, along with the citizenry who tolerated or ignored what Washington was doing.
On the foreign policy horizon, let’s keep everything in perspective and on the table. G.W. Bush, who is a modern day, real-life Charlie McCarthy, and his mentor, Richard Cheney, who corresponds to Edgar Bergen, are only symptoms of a larger problem, a mystery bigger than the aberration misnamed “neoconservatism”. Bush and Cheney are the end-products of an historical development a century in the making.
America’s current predicament on the world’s stage can be accurately diagnosed, but not so easily reversed. May I suggest that it is the result of two overly ambitious concepts in the realm of foreign affairs, which concepts have evolved over many decades, commencing around the start of the 20th Century, at the time of the Spanish-American war of 1898.
First, there was the brainstorm borrowed from the British Empire experience, innocently conceived by President William McKinley and by his idealistic Secretary of State, John Hay, that to get America directly involved in overseeing the internal affairs of other nations was a brilliant, beneficent idea for all parties concerned. Hay and McKinley did not recognized it as inherently dishonest, at odds with the tradition of a republic born in revolt against an empire.
They did not comprehend that it was meddling and officious. Soon their idea was taken for granted in the hallways of the White House, starting with Teddy Roosevelt.
By the time of Woodrow Wilson and that of his mysterious éminence grise, “Colonel” Edward House, American triumphalism was firmly entrenched. It was an article of faith that led to wars. Some were small, like the guerilla insurrection which broke out in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. Others were titanic, like the Second World War and its precursor, the Great War of 1914-18.
Second, the entire body politic of America--not just “the elites” in Washington, but “the man in the street”--came to believe that the United States had somehow acquired the right, indeed the duty, to intervene in matters that were legitimately none of America’s business.
It was a presumption which amounted to hubris across the board. There is no such right, duty or obligation. Ezra Pound stated in 1927: “The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius; it consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other peoples’ affairs.” Pound was correct, and so was Confucius. But hubris is still with us, big time. Indeed, it remains the sine qua non of American foreign policy.
No matter how unwise, deluded and suborned the politicians in Washington might be, no matter how powerful its various war lobbies and special interest groups might become, America could not have arrived at the point of being where it is today--an overextended and perhaps near bankrupt empire--unless the above two premises were in place and in play.
On February 15th, 2007 an important article appeared in The New York Review of Books by foreign policy scholar William Pfaff. It was entitled “America’s Manifest Destiny” and explicates some of the above ideas in great detail. Pfaff argues for a more reasonable and a less grandiose approach to American foreign policy; he argues against the interventionist and triumphalist mode which has proven to be so counter-productive, if not actually self-destructive. Such heresy has routinely been denounced as “isolationism” for the past 70+ years, but it is nothing more than common sense.
The most thought-provoking sentence in Pfaff’s long article could be his rhetorical question: “What is the threat that America keeps at bay?” The short answer is that most of the presumed threats are illusory. More to the point, they were created by Washington to advance a private agenda, often quite brazenly. This is becoming clear as mud today, but it has been the case since 1917. The train wreck in the Middle East, which accelerated out of control after 9/11, should force at least some literate Americans to reevaluate their history and ask themselves the simple question, “How did we get here?” How, indeed?
For starters, take the Cold War. It was a response to the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union, its surrogates and satellites. But the Soviet Union as a “Superpower” entity was itself the creation of American interventionism. The cause of Soviet communism was hugely advanced when Washington, in the person of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, intervened in the internal affairs of Europe in the late 1930’s. This meddling by Washington culminated in a fratricidal war on the continent of Europe, which ended with Stalin and the Red Army in full control of half of it.
Please note that the Second World War began as a European war in September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, the upshot from a long-standing, unresolved border dispute between Germany and Poland. This dispute was due to the bizarre circumstance of the German port city of Danzig on the Baltic Sea having been detached from Germany by the Versailles “peace” treaty of 1919. Danzig was left surrounded by Polish territory of the newly-resurrected Polish state.
The new Polish republic was itself a creation of English, French, and American diplomats at Versailles. Without a doubt, the disagreement with respect to the northeastern border of Germany could have been resolved peacefully by the two parties concerned through negotiations, had it not been for the outside interference of London and Washington.
That interference directly led to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939, signed in Moscow, in which Germany and Russia sought to regain territory they both had lost to the Poles in the Great War. The conflict continued on Polish territory, which served as a battle ground in a gruesome struggle between Germany and Russia, and resulted in the German military occupation of all of Poland. It ended in 1945 with the outright annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union, and with the submergence of the rest of Poland behind the Iron Curtain for more than forty years.
To a remarkable degree, still unappreciated to this day, the war in Europe which commenced in 1939 was promoted behind the scenes by the Roosevelt Administration, using London as its cat’s-paw. The first and perhaps greatest victim was Poland. The sequence of events is as follows. At Washington’s instigation, London and Paris declared war against Germany, but not Russia.
Then, after declaring war, London and Paris did absolutely nothing to assist Poland as she found herself invaded on two sides--from the west by Germany and from the east by Russia. These realities set in motion a chain reaction that the White House realized it could not control from the sidelines. It obliged Roosevelt, a few years later, to railroad an “isolationist” America into the war in Europe, using the ruse of the “surprise” Japanese attack in December, 1941 on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Roosevelt’s treachery at Pearl Harbor was followed by his military crusade on the European continent, which resulted in, among other things, the carpet bombing of Germany into rubble, the immiserization of Italy and, in general, the wholesale wrecking of Europe as an independent entity. Then came the crowning achievement, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorized by Harry Truman, which events killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in a flash, a war crime for the ages.
True, Roosevelt’s intervention in Europe and Asia did, as intended, provide a winning formula to terminate the Great Depression and to divert attention away from the failure of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda. However, in the aftermath it left all of Europe starving, in ruins, and occupied by extra-territorial forces. Moreover, England was broke and reduced to a nullity, the once great British Empire was kaput, the Empire of Japan was smashed, the Red Chinese were in power, the Korean communists in the ascendency, and Stalin had conquered half of Europe, with his agents actively subverting the other half.
Such were some of the more obvious benefits of Washington’s triumphalism up to that time for the people on the ground and on the receiving-end.
Bear in mind, as well, that the Second World War was preordained by the defeat of the Central Powers in the Great War of 1914-18. The collapse of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918 was the direct result of Washington, in the person of Woodrow Wilson, arriving at the eleventh hour to rescue the leaders of the British Empire who had miscalculated and gotten in over their heads, and who had already lost their war against the Kaiser on the Western Front in France.
John Bull had finally met his match. The Great War and the vindictive Versailles peace treaty of 1919 not only made the Second World War inevitable, but also created the Soviet Union and launched the career of Adolf Hitler.
Twenty years later, the secret diplomacy of another U.S. President, FDR, would propel Moscow into the very heart of Europe and lay the groundwork for the Cold War.
This latter enterprise was a belated attempt by Washington to prevent Moscow and the Red Army from ingesting the rest of Europe. It succeeded when the Soviet Union and the fraud known as “communism” finally imploded in 1989 due to the weight of internal contradictions, thereby leaving Washington on stage as the world’s “lone surviving Superpower.”
In brief, the bloodstained track record of U.S. foreign policy since 1898 has been an amazing saga of buttinskyism degenerating into bullying on a grand scale, all masquerading as altruism. The record has been remarkably consistent. [Perhaps the only notable exception was when the U.S. Senate, led by Harvard historian Henry Cabot Lodge, defied Wilson and refused to ratify the Versailles treaty and declined U.S. membership in the League of Nations.]
Like the present impossible fiasco in Iraq, presided over by Cheney and Bush, both world wars of the 20th Century were “of choice”, entered into by determined hypocrites and prevaricators operating out of the White House. Sad to say, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is not unique or unprecedented.
It is part of a pattern. Except for Soviet ICBM’s during Cold War, America was not a target and has not been in actual danger from any of the countries which Washington has chosen to invade, overrun, or bomb to smithereens. Prior to September 11th, 2001, continental America had not come under attack since British redcoats occupied Washington in 1814, and burned its public buildings to the ground.
The average American, on whose behalf (presumably) and in whose name all this aggressive adventurism was undertaken, has been bamboozled and utilized as cannon fodder by the powers-that-be. Today, a moderate form of mass hysteria reigns.
We have been advised or propagandized that America must now confront an Islamic terrorist threat, and we should be prepared to engage in a protracted “clash of civilizations” otherwise known as the “fight against terrorism”.
This conflict with Islam magically appeared on the radar screen very soon after the collapse of Communism, which brought the curtain down on the Cold War. Gore Vidal’s wry, off-the-cuff comment--”It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a coincidence”--is most appropriate, if not spot on.
The new threat has been wildly exaggerated and, to a certain extent, fabricated. The jihadist danger was entirely avoidable, including the atrocities of 9/11. That is what makes it all so maddening. Indeed, whatever threat does exist was brought into being by Washington’s own counter-productive activities. To cite the most obvious example, in our post 9/11 world, al-Qaeda and terrorism in Iraq did not exist until Cheney and Bush invaded and occupied Iraq.
Do you recall the Christian foreign minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, explaining in the run-up to “Operation Iraqi Freedom” that Baghdad did not even have diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was sheltering Osama bin Laden?
But now, with a straight face, Bush proclaims that the terrorism, which his own invasion of Iraq created, must be defeated at any price, no matter how long it takes—or America will be placed in mortal danger.
This is insufferable, ridiculous and embarrassing. By far, the actual danger to America and Europe is from “blowback”—the unforeseen, unintended but inevitable consequences of bizarre foreign policy initiatives executed by Washington’s crackbrained politicians of both parties. Due to laziness and misinformation, such policies have remained unknown to the vast majority of the American people, who at this point are understandably bewildered and confused. Is it any wonder?
Have you thought about what motivated the Arab terrorists who attacked New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11th, 2001?
It must have been something. It may well have been, as Middle East expert Robert Fisk pointed out the following day, a set of circumstances impacting the Middle East which profoundly affected and disturbed them, and which ultimately drove them insane.
We were informed by the White House in the immediate aftermath of the attacks that it had something to do with the terrorists’ hatred of our freedom and democracy.
But that glib explanation was designed to divert attention away from the true significance of what had happened. It showed no appreciation for the destructive forces unleashed thanks to decades of U.S. foreign policy arrogance, neglect and malfeasance in the Middle East.
There is a common thread woven through the Great War, the Second World War, and now the multiple battlegrounds in the Middle East. The European bloodbath of the Great War, known as World War I, ended with the defeat of the Central Powers. This unlikely outcome destroyed the Ottoman Empire and gifted the world with Communism for Russia, Zionism for Palestine, and a land grab by the British Empire throughout the Middle East and beyond. How is that for a dose of freedom and democracy?
The entry of Woodrow Wilson, late into the conflict on the side of England in 1917, was an impressive accomplishment. It marked a decisive turning point, for which the honorable gentlemen in Whitehall—Lloyd George, Sir Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill—felt compelled to reward, as a quid pro quo, a kind of gratuity, Palestine to the Zionists, notwithstanding that this transfer would represent a blatant betrayal of the Arabs who had fought alongside the British and against the Turks, and notwithstanding that it violated the most basic human and political rights of the indigenes, the people already there, to wit, the Palestinians, both Muslims and Christians, in the Holy Land.
Albion perfidy; I am referring here to the long forgotten Balfour Declaration, the final draft of which was composed in Washington during the summer of 1917, before being passed back to London for a signature by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour in November of that year. This cryptic document consisting of three short paragraphs, and its subsequent implementation by London starting in 1920 under the leadership of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, provided the legal framework for a massive confidence trick on the back porch of Europe, which continues to this day. It is the root of our present difficulties.
The rest, to coin a phrase, is history. There is an unbroken connection between the Great War, America’s unnecessary participation in it, and everything which has transpired since then all over the Middle East. It is a continuum. In Iraq, Lebanon and in Palestine, we are witnessing today the third chapter, in effect, of the European war begun in 1914—a war which destroyed Old Europe and which may, in the end, destroy America.
International power politics at a critical juncture in the annals of the British Empire have combined with an incendiary U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, based on American domestic politics, to turn the world upside down.
We live in that world. America was sidetracked in 1898, and soon thereafter hijacked by its own unscrupulous, vainglorious politicians, just like England before it. At present, the capitol city of the new empire is carrying out a policy of disruption, war and manipulation in the Middle East to advance the same hidden agenda, just as London did after the Great War.
This is the central reality of our time, a reality which is increasingly difficult to deny or ignore, because it has become so apparent and brazen.
One fact should also be clear: this project did not start the day before yesterday with Dick Cheney, G.W. Bush and with their accomplices, those agents provocateurs known as “the neocons”.
These latter have only perfected a pre-existing scheme and taken it to a new level, employing the diversionary cover story they invented, to wit, “the clash of civilizations.” From one empire to the next. We cannot go back to the dream.
Patrick Foy is author of The Unauthorized World Situation Report.
An excellent piece; after reading it I ask myself, is there any hope for our republic to be awakened from this nightmare? Unfortunately Americans do not give a flipping damn in the majority.
Posted by samuel burke on Jun 12, 2007.
"The truth is, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. It is long gone, and nobody is particularly concerned.”
If that is a factually accurate statement, then the only legal stance to take is that the original governing structure of these United States springs back into legality. The Articles of Confederation, established in 1781, was shoved aside in 1789 when a sufficient number of states ratified the new Constitution. Ten different presidents served under the Articles of Confederation.
Far from being a badly designed scheme of government, the Articles served as the structure to give order and coherence to the Revolutionary War even before ratification of sufficient states to bring the articles into legal existence in 1781. Its crowning glories were the defeat of monarchical governance in the person of George III and the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance.
Apparently the Congress of the Confederation met for what turned out to be a final meeting on October 10, 1788, but never adjourned sine die as it would have were it to have intended to disappear into history.
In any case, a fallback structure exists that could provide a federal structure if a need arose.
[For the know-nothings, the Articles of Confederation was not the government of the Confederate States of America.]
Posted by Donald on Jun 12, 2007.
I’d like to add to or say something profound about Patrick Foy on The Death of the American Empire but I can only say thanks for the history lesson.
Posted by TFG on Jun 12, 2007.
The amusing part is that most Americans don’t realise the American Empire is dying. They are to busy with tv sports, porn, working at Wal Mart, and other diversions to take notice. They behave as if the US were still top dog. All the while, ther US is being invaded at home and being humiliated abroad. If and when Ameicans finally wake up, I sincerely hope they will take action against those responsible: the traitors and subversives in Washington DC, corporate headquarters, and the media outlets.
Posted by Trevor on Jun 12, 2007.
How many men in 100 understand this vs. the History Channel version of the last 100 years? How many are willing to endure the psychic scarring that occurs when you realize you were raised on lies? How many are willing to try and wrestle the steering wheel back from THEM?
The answer is not enough. This train must wreck and until then, worse is better, worse is better.
Posted by neeechee on Jun 12, 2007.
"The new threat has been wildly exaggerated and, to a certain extent, fabricated. The jihadist danger was entirely avoidable, including the atrocities of 9/11.”
Just how avoidable, and more importantly, just how fabricated, is becoming all too clear:
http://www.st911.org/
Posted by B.R. Merrick on Jun 12, 2007.
American involvement in the affairs of Europe at the beginning of the 20th century was inevitable. The decline of the power of the British Empire and the rise of Germany meant America would be faced with a hostile Europe under German rule in the twentieth century. America could not rely on the British Navy to protect Western interests and had to assume Britain’s responsiblities in the world.
Posted by Joe on Jun 12, 2007.
The Constitution has been severely wounded, but the fascination with Rep. Dr. Ron Paul shows that there’s still hope & that the effort to force the Federal Government back to within its Constitutional Bounds is worthwhile.
Posted by Rich Beecher on Jun 12, 2007.
Perhaps Mr. Foy is right that WWII resulted from an arrogant, misguided foreign policy on the part of the United States. Alternately, it could have occurred because a genocidal, nihilistic, megalomanic happened to get control of the greatest military force in the world.
I think I’ll go ask a few of the many WWII combat vets. I know which interpretation they favor. Oh, that’s right, they’re all misguided dupes like the rest of us.
Posted by B Henry on Jun 12, 2007.
Mr. Foy wrote: “Then came the crowning achievement, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorized by Harry Truman, which events killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in a flash, a war crime for the ages.” Would Mr. Foy and friends have had American soldiers, marines and sailors die so that he could sleep soundly? The purpose of war is to terrorize the enemy into submission.
Being shot at is not the most pleasant of sensibilities. Japan, not Germany, killed the most during World War II. Just ask any Chinese. I have never met one who had great sympathy for Japanese. Americans have contrived to forget we were the great suppliers of the Japanese war machine before Pearl Harbor.
In 1995 when Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama visited Peking he was met by an accusation in the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese government, that 35 million Chinese died due to brutality of the Japanese. Within days the New York Times had an article written by their Tokyo correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner which credited only 10 million Chinese dying due to Japanese depredations. Who would want to quibble over 25 million dead Chinese?
It must be noted this number was over four times the number of Jews killed by the Nazis and occurred in the period remembered by Jews as the Holocaust to the exclusion of other people dying and by most of the rest of the world as World War II. The Chinese have never forgotten this, and one must assume one day they will make sure the rest of the world, most particularly the United States, does not either.
Forgotten by most Americans has been the Russian entry into the war against Japan. When counting the dead Mr. Foy should make allowances that the Japanese attribute more dead from Russian captivity than both atomic bombs.
Americans should only apologize and cringe so much.
Posted by Richard Earley on Jun 12, 2007.
Great piece of historical analysis. Thanks.
Posted by Jerry C. Meng on Jun 12, 2007.
Wow, it’s really embarassing to hear so many grown free men admitting defeat. Not me brothers, not me. I’m as free as a bird and the Federal government can kiss my lilly white butt. Yes, I’m caged, but it’s my SWORN duty to escape.
Ron Paul for President!
Will Blalock Brazoria, Texas Ron Paul’s Fighting 14th District
Posted by Will Blalock on Jun 12, 2007.
And here I thought the purpose of war was to defend youself against unjust aggressors. silly me.
Posted by c matt on Jun 12, 2007.
Mr. Foy is on target, but not on the bullseye. The Spanish-American War was blueprinted in “American Interest in Seapower” by A. T. Mahan in 1897, except that Mahan was tactful enough not to suggest taking the Philippines from Spain. William Jennings Bryan’s finest hour came when he resigned as Wilson’s Secretary of State because Wilson’s brand of neutralism between the Allies and Central Powers was guaranteed to bring us into the war on the British side, and Bryan, a Christian pacifist, wanted no part of it.
There is some speculation that Wilson truly believed that God intended the Anglo-Saxon race to rule the world in the name of Jesus Christ. Whether Germany would have won had the US sat it out is an interesting question. Had the two sides negotiated a mutually tolerable peace, Adolf Hitler might have had a successful career doing watercolors of ancient buildings.
The US having interfered and helped dictate the Treaty of Versailles, WWII was inevitable. Hitler and Stalin’s divvying up of Poland was essentially restoring that part of the map to what it had been before the Paris Peace Conference. Roosevelt II certainly wanted America’s strength to facilitate an Anglo-Soviet victory, but he was far too much of a ship-lover to have sat back and let the Pacific Fleet get skunked the way it did.
All we needed to be at war with Japan was to be attacked, not skunked.
Also there was no guarantee that war with Japan necessarily meant war with Germany and Italy. Pearl Harbor, December 7. Declaration of war with Japan, December 8. There was no war with Germany until Hitler declared war on the US on December 11 and the US responded on December 12.
If Hitler had had the canny forbearance to sit back while the America Firsters ended lend-least to Churchill and Stalin so that the US could concentrate on Japan, he just might have won. Had Roosevelt known what Admiral Yamamoto was up to, he was astute enough to imagine this and act accordingly. Sorry, try again.
As for Truman’s failure to accept Churchill’s advice about how to deal with Stalin and his allowing a serious cold war to get started unnecessarily, rather than keeping things down to a brass-knuckles game of chess, the less said the better.
What’s really dismaying is that the US, having become the world’s only (military) superpower, has taken up all the ghastly practices the “Readers’ Digest” used to excoriate the USSR and Red China for when I was a kid. And it’s all a self-destructive mistake. Karl Rove is a big fan of McKinley and his administration.
The neoconservative (neoimperialist) mistake is to think that they can do it all over again. Their fatal fallacy is in failing to acknowledge that, in 1898, the US was on the way up. We’ve been on the way down since VJ Day, but nobody wants to admit it and rethink things accordingly.
Posted by Reg Stocking on Jun 12, 2007.
This is an excellent overview. Rather than America and the Anglosphere being the ‘good guys’ they have been led by Elites who use their peoples as cannon fodder and tax slaves to wage wars, physical and cultural, first and foremost to weaken and humiliate, if not necessarily destroy, all nations that could, might could we would emphasize in the hill South, revive its part of historic, pre-Modern Christendom.
America, taking over for the British Empire, is serving the role as imperial giant to replace the vestiges of Western Christian Civilization with centralized, multicultural secularism held together by military force and bread and circuses.
Posted by James Cantrell on Jun 12, 2007.
It fascinates me how nearly everyone has his own inviolable interpretation of history. Everyone is a sort of revisionist, yet no one wants his interpretation revised. Maybe Henry Ford was right when he said that history is mostly bunk. Change a critical fact or two in any construction of history and the whole edifice comes tumbling down.
For my own money, George Washington gave the best advice when he counseled us to eschew entangling alliances (mind our own business). That was our Founding Father’s parsimonious political model for foreign affairs. But that’s no fun, is it?
Posted by Mr. FoSquare on Jun 12, 2007.
Mr. Fo Square’s citation of the functionally illiterate Henry Ford does hit the edge of the target. History is too much fun to be mostly bunk, though many interpretations do have a high buncombe content. Reading various accounts, including ones with which one instinctively disagrees, and deciding for oneself is the best way to go about it.
Washington’s rejection of entangling alliances was commonsense enlightenment when the United States was [not were] materially self- sufficient, militarily weak, and enjoyed thousands of miles’ worth of saltwater insulation with no Atlantic cables to disturb our domestic tranquillity. Sad to say, things have changed since then. What the answer is I don’t know, but it’s easy to identify things which aren’t. Such as so-called neoconservatism.
Posted by Reg Stocking on Jun 12, 2007.
Our entangled relationship with Israel by itself has constituted a catastrophic foreign policy. This relationship isn’t driven by economic inter-dependency, the “shrinking globe,” military needs, or by any other reasonable explanation. It’s driven by the pervasive influence of Jewish Power throughout our vital institutions.
The so-called neo-conservatives (Zionist penetration of the Republican Party) are just a more recent manifestation of that insidious virus, and only one dimension of it. Yes, the world is a more complicated place today. But Washington’s cautionary advice applies as well today as a starting point for foreign policy as it did in his time.
Posted by Mr. FoSquare on Jun 13, 2007.
It is true, as Mr. FoSquare says, that America’s entanglement with Israel has constituted a catastrophic foreign policy. But as that did not occur until 1948 and the catastrophies began much earlier, focusing on Israel is to highlight a symptom rather than the cause.
The great cause is that once the Yankees won The War and made Anglo-Saxopn Puritan culture America’s mandarin culture, the reconstituted singular USA was bound to become a self-righteous empire that would promote Jewish interest because ideas have consequences, they move toward inherent and sometimes unavoidable ends. As A-S Puritanism was the quintessential late Reformatiion era hardcore Judaizing heresy, it is a given that any culture it rules, it directs, will become very much like the USA of the past century and more.
Oliver Cromwell and Benjamin Disraeli and Abe Lincoln and British Empire worshiping Woodrow Wilson lead almost ineluctably to today’s Neocons and the final transformation of America into a centralized ‘democratic’ empire mandating worldwide abortion, homosexual promotion, religious syncretism and indifferentism, and philosophical relativism ruled by Anglophonic Elite might makes right judgment.
Posted by James Cantrell on Jun 14, 2007.
Mr. Foy,
I linked here from Antiwar. What an excellent overview. Personally, I found Stennett’s “Day of Deceit’ and various reports on how America was seduced/dragged into WW I real eye-openers in understanding the degree to which US foreign policy - along with that of many other nations - has been so nakedly driven by interests far removed from those of the citizenry involved.
Most of the stories we grew up on in which most Germans were monsters, and now most Islamists are fascists, were and are hogwash. It takes quite a bit of hard work, not to mention a certain amount of courage, to be able to penetrate the fog of mass deception in which we all blunder along. Again, this is an excellent overview.
PS. One link I have on WW I is this, for those who are interested. The paragraph which includes ‘March 5’ (to search for) is particularly interesting in revealing how the creation of the Zionist state was central to getting the US involved in WWI, something which to this day is largely unknown, and certainly not ‘kosher’ cocktail party fare! http://www.hypocrisy.biz/Balfour.html
I don’t know anything about the website as a whole; this link came about from a search for connections between Zionists and the Balfour agreement and US involvement in WW I about which I had read earlier and elsewhere but not saved.
Posted by Ashley Howes on Jun 14, 2007.
Very Interesting! Glad to hear someone talk sense. Islam does not condone violence but it does talk about fighting back and dignity. Islam is misunderstood on two fronts firstly by the idiots who purport to be representatives of Islam and the secondly by the Western governments who fear Islam (and rightly so). Jihad is the usual point of discussion, of which, sadly I have seen very few people talk sense.
I see a change in America, a land itself occupied, whose inhabitants were killed to make way for people yelling ‘new world’ when the world was not new at all. A history tainted and written in the blood of others, cannot bring peace to others. Islam will and is rising in America. Peace will prevail then. For those who are upset with the brief description of a few aspects of Islam, I suggest you read the Quran before you comment.
Posted by Faheem Sardar on Jun 14, 2007.
The “Death of the American Empire” is simply the best, concise, short history of America and of our horrific impact on the world stage and on what we have lost as a nation since Lincoln’s War, that I have ever read in my 57 years.
Nothing can compare to this article in terms on enlightenment, or sadness at the well hidden history and failure of the greatest experiment in self-government and liberty in world history.
For those of us who seek truth, love history and who bear the burden of living in a nation where false history, propaganda and unrighteous self-delusion surround everything we read and observe involving politics, the news and current events, Patrick Foy provides us a brief moment of sanity and sincere honesty about what we really have become.
The first step on the road to recovery from a tragedy whether a serious addiction, the loss of a loved one or the sobering realization that we have made a tragic mistake with terrible consequences is to see ourselves and our actions as they really are. I can’t quarrel with a single point in the article or the conclusions.
It is time that we as Americans, take stock of our true situation, spread the word about where we are and how we got here hopefully in time to preserve our wealth and begin to restore our liberties so we can survive as a people as the empire crashes down around us.
I’ve found that when you realize that you’ve taken the wrong road, the best action is often to backtrack to the last sure landmark that you can remember. It is the same for our nation and I believe we should go back to our original limited government, the Articles of Confederation as established by our Patriot Founding Fathers.
I will today, forward this article and URL to the thousands of people on the e-mail lists from my websites and I urge you to do the same to all of your friends who love liberty and seek to understand our real history and restore the failed legacy of our Founding Fathers. In addition, I’ll add a link to it in my new online book, “The Swiss Preserve Solution” a new politically incorrect guide to defending your wealth & liberty from attack during the latter-days of the American Empire. More info on the free book can be found at http://www.swissconfederationinstitute.org
Ron Holland President of The Swiss Confederation Institute and marketing coordinator for FreedomFest.
Posted by Ron Holland on Jun 14, 2007.
Brilliant writing. Yes, there’s a common thread. Zionism. Zionists bludgeoned Wilson into restarting WWI to: 1. acquire Palestine, and; 2. smash the Kaiser. Sadly, all the rest follows from that Jewish pressure applied to Woodrow Wilson. Balfour, Versailles, WWII, the postwar breakdown of traditional White border controls, the non-White invasions in all White lands, Neocon control of Washington, and now Iraq. A war devised and
run by Likudniks.
Yes, it’s time for a revolution. Ron Paul can be part of that revolution.
Posted by Jamie Kelso on Jun 14, 2007.
No Arabs did 911 on America. If the author could not see this,then I question any of his history remarks. Hitler’s Germany was also funded by USA and not one word why Germany attacked Russia-Twice. And who are we grooming today to attack Russia? EU !Sad part is the Zionist hating the Russians and we die for them .
Posted by JoJo on Jun 14, 2007.
This article is very objective and near to truth from a westener. This world history and if you go through Koran then the fate history fate of most of the rulers when they were arrogant and were not stoped the world had to suffer the same the same case is with America. They have lost the credibility to lead the world. We Muslim are direct sufferer of American Hegamony. History repeats as the American destroyed Pearl harbor and attacked Japan, the same idea happened with Muslims
Posted by Ghouri on Jun 14, 2007.
Arab terrprist attacked on 911??? Evidence please. Sheesh, what nonsense! At least seven of the accused are still alive. There are no airport videos. Names do not appear on passenger lists. What garbage.
Posted by Ralph on Jun 14, 2007.
Mr. Foy does not give nearly enough credit to the Zionists for our involvement in the destruction of the Mid East. Zionists pushed for the destruction of Iraq, are aiding a civil war in what is left of Palestine, trying for another in Lebanon and are howling for nuclear destruction of Iran. All of this destructive evil just to to “legitimatize” the theft of land. America’s insane participation in this crime will someday be so clear to anyone shifting through the ashes of a ruined empire.
Posted by richard vajs on Jun 14, 2007.
I find it amazing that an arrogant mental runt like George Bush, could so easily and quickly destroy, what was once the greatest nation on earth. Certainly, Dick Cheney gets much credit. We have nothing left to go with, credibility, gold or silver, constitution, congressional oversight, justice, nothing; except nuclear weapons and delivery systems. I suppose we use those weapons and then the end. Ron Pollan
Posted by Ron Pollan on Jun 14, 2007.
The article does show America drifting into destruction by violating its own Constitution by greedy, power hungary politicians, and now by Corporate Greed, displacing USA workers for foreigners. The displacing of American workers is treason by Corporate America.
Posted by John Calvin on Jun 14, 2007.
People of faith believe in their inherent power to change their surroundings. When enough people within the United States begin to believe that we can and must remove the current leadership and restructure our government it will happen. Until then, we will not be swayed by intelligent “ringers” planted for the specific purpose to destroy the hope and efforts of the faithful. The sheep are awakening!
Posted by Charlotte Smith on Jun 14, 2007.
The American Empire is dead. Chimpy and Cheney killed it.
Posted by Tom3 on Jun 14, 2007.
Excellent material, all. Reminds one never to believe deeply in anything, since when confronted with conflicting facts the mind goes into cognitive dissonance which is an impossible state of mind.
For my part, I look to Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope” for a fairly accurate expose of modern history. The villans are ll lined up and their intent soundly defined. Carroll, though, saw no problem in a world run by the few, as did Plato before him. Me and mine, however, are preparing the Walters Compound for meaner times ahead, and are as anxious as children on Christmas eve.
“Good luck and good hunting” might be an appropriate quote these days.
Posted by Tom Walters on Jun 14, 2007.
Nothing new here, just some history lessons and spin and italicized foreign words (including some that don’t need to be italicized; they have already been assimilated).
No abstract thoughts in this this article.
For a more thoughtful approach, I would suggest referring to the work of Morris Berman ("The Twilight of American Culture” or Stewart Ewen.)
This is not our century. We are 5 percent of the world’s population, and that will be reflected in world economics and politics. We have, as the author noted, lost our way, but we had a pretty decent life as late as the Fifties or Sixties.
Capitalism was refuted by experience in the Thirties. We never would have escaped from the Great Depression had it not been for World War II, no matter who started it.
Thompson is right. Look for a new way, just as the Declaration of Independence says you should. Happy Independence Day.
Posted by Clayton Hallmark on Jun 14, 2007.
Big gap in your knowledge of history, sir. The Jacobin revolution of 1861 saw our States invaded, cities burned to the ground, and civilians starved and murdered on a scale much larger than in 1814. That was the end of the Republic and the shredding of the Constitution. You can look the other way if you want, but that won’t make it go away.
Posted by Elizabeth Del Greco on Jun 14, 2007.
A wonderfully, well-written analysis of history and the state of affairs we have today. Sadly, far too few Americans have the intellectual honesty or curiousity to consider this story. May that start to change.
Posted by JR Bowman on Jun 14, 2007.
I’ve some minor quibbles with Mr. Foy’s argument about American responsibility for both world wars (there’s no denying that Austro-Hungarian imperialism ignited the first, nor that Hitler sought to achieve his goals through war as well), but the main point of the article is factually accurate: the United State has been an empire for over a century, thanks to the messianic Yankee Puritanism that triumphed in 1865 (see Acton’s letter to Lee about the cause lost at Appomatox to understand this fully). The question now is whether it can recover from it (assuming there’s any will to do so) and how. When it comes to that, I’m a pessimist.
Posted by Nebojsa Malic on Jun 14, 2007.
Wow! Every now and then one comes across a corner of the internet where clarity reigns. Both the article and the excellent comments about it give me hope in this time of deep, deep darkness. It is heartening to see that not everyone thinks that history started in 1945. Kudos to all!
Posted by Empire of Idiots on Jun 14, 2007.
This was a brilliant piece. But James Cantrell should be writing his own pieces! He is a genius.
For example he wrote ...
America, taking over for the British Empire, is serving the role as imperial giant to replace the vestiges of Western Christian Civilization with centralized, multicultural secularism held together by military force and bread and circuses.
Oliver Cromwell and Benjamin Disraeli and Abe Lincoln and British Empire worshiping Woodrow Wilson lead almost ineluctably to today’s Neocons and the final transformation of America into a centralized ‘democratic’ empire mandating worldwide abortion, homosexual promotion, religious syncretism and indifferentism, and philosophical relativism ruled by Anglophonic Elite might makes right judgment.
Posted by Anthony C. LoBaido on Jun 14, 2007.
Rather, Manifest Insanity. “The World Turned Upside Down”, indeed!
Posted by Vic Anderson on Jun 14, 2007.
Great piece, Mr. Foy, and accurate. To those above who complain that it’s only Mr. Foy’s version of history, I draw your attention to these three disparate pieces.
If you have access to the LA Times Archives or Lexis-Nexis: “Commentary; A Serious Case of Mistaken Identity; The U.S. is not the ‘indispensable nation,’ as a growing WWII mythology would suggest”; BENJAMIN SCHWARZ. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Jun 22, 2000. pg. 11. Schwarz was the Literary Editor for the Atlantic Monthly at the time.
The second is “Equality, not Zionism, Will Save Israel” by Anthony Loewenstein on Tony Karon’s excellent blog. Karon is the Senior Editor for Time Magazine, a South African, Jewish, and lived on a kibbutz in his youth: http://tonykaron.com/2007/06/11/loewenstein-equality-not-zionism-will-save-israel/
The third is far more controversial for its content: Benjamin H. Freedman’s 1961 speech at the Willard Hotel in D.C. Freedman was a successful NYC Jewish businessman who broke with Judaism in 1945, and changed his last name to represent how he felt.
One of the last interviewers to talk to him before his death discovered that Freedman’s father was a co-founder of the American Jewish Committee in 1906. Freedman was present at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with Bernard Baruch when they were carving up Germany. His speech describes what led up to it and what happened afterward, The link: http://www.themodernreligion.com/jihad/freedman.html. If you search online for Benjamin H. Freedman, you can find a recording of it.
Posted by John Silver on Jun 14, 2007.
Brilliant article. The real culprit in all this is your Constitution. It can be interpreted to mean ANYTHING by an unprincipled, crafty lawyer and you have a wealth (no pun intended) of those in America.
Posted by peter on Jun 14, 2007.
The USSR was never a threat to the United States. On the contrary, WE were a threat to THEM. Their nuclear weapons were acquired to deter any US nuclear attacks on Soviet soil. (Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki--there was a precedent.) Horrible as the Soviet experiment was, their foreign policy was essentially defensive and highly cautious.
And their invasion of Europe was a result of the bloodletting that cost them 20 million lives. Incidentally, Hungary and Rumania were Axis countries that participated in the German invasion of Russia.
This, of course, goes against all US orthodoxies, whether liberal, conservative, or libertarian.
Posted by Gene H. Bell-Villada on Jun 14, 2007.
How did we get from there and then to now? First off, the south could not have been allowed to survive as a slave state. Secondly, to suggest that Hitler would have been satiffied with Poland is ridiculous. Thirdly to suggest that the present insanity can be laid at the feet of the fact that government of, by and for the people is somehow obsolete is to deny the last great hope for humanity. I will leave you with a line from my son’s first play “Wine To Blood” in which Sean O’Leary says, ‘I don’t konow if there is a Utopia, but I am certain that we must act as though there can be”.
Posted by Hal O'Leary on Jun 14, 2007.
Fascinating summary which I mostly agree with, except – WWII. You don’t seem to attribute any homicidal malice or danger from Adolf Hitler, and I don’t think the world would benefit from his having conquered western Europe and England. I don’t think that would have been nice or beneficial at all. And the loss of even more Jews would have seriously deprived us culturally, intellectually, scientifically, etc., not to mention the poor example set by the death camps. That really had to be interfered with.
Otherwise, I agree that we absolutely should let the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, take care of its own business, while maintaining human intellligence to monitor events that could affect the U.S. Bring home all soldiers, weapons, equipment from South America, Europe, Korea, Middle East. We can be sure the oil will always find its way to the market.
Posted by Mary Garber on Jun 15, 2007.
’Death of American Empire’ by Patrick Foy is an outstanding article eloquently but neatly summarising reality.
The only element I personally would like him to have included would be a reference to ‘Ozymandias’ - Percy Bysshe Shelley’s inestimable comment on the inevitability of nemesis following hubris:
‘My Name is Ozymandias King of kings look on my works ye mighty and despair’
The ‘traveller in an Antique Land’ may well have been traversing Mesopotamia [The land between between two rivers]- or modern day Iraq - while the concluding desolation of the last few lines.
‘Nothing beside remains. Around the base of that colossal wreck the lone and level sands stretch far away’ well pressages the outcome and the end game for the insane delusions of US foreign policy.
It is further noteworthy that throughout history the end of empire tends always to be immediately preceeded by severe economic pressure brought about by grandiose overstretch - combined in the last throes with the feverish sabre rattling of terminal decline and ultimate collapse.
Posted by RJ on Jun 15, 2007.
Now we know why Southerners fought so valiantly in the War to Prevent Southern Independence. Lincoln was admired by Karl Marx and openly said so. Mr. Foy would enhance his position more by including more on the War of northern Agression and the similarities that exist today between W the Emperor and Abe I.
Also lost on all of this is the massacre and genocide of Native Americans after the end of the CSA.
Much of the terrorist tactics against Indians were lead by Sherman, who had perfected them against innocent civilians in the South.We can now see the nation’s propoganda machine in rewriting the true history of our country in today’s vilification of anything southern including her culture and symbols mainly ,the battle flag which is the only true American flag.. The other S$S one represents empire.
How can we make Mr. Foy’s work more widespread to wake the rest of us up? I see this as a daunting task in the face of what Jimmy Carter called a malaisse. Godspeed Mr. Foy!
Posted by Ronnie Abrams on Jun 16, 2007.
Brilliant insights,I would suggest Patrick Foy might have stepped back further in US history that would reveal an impulse of the Judeo-christian project ( in-group loyalty, out-group contempt) that started with the domination and subsequent genocide of the native americans. Today most of those people have disappeared without leaving a trace as to who they were and how they lived and what they thought felt or believed.
This puts the “democratic” forms of the project into context. No matter what the constitution says and who gets elected the project continues. After all the land belonged to someone else.
Once north america had been overrun the original impulse drove what Patrick Foy has described, and the quest for global domination continues.
In Palestine or Iraq, this impulse finds its current expression as enslavement is followed by ethnic cleansing. This impulse will continue until the US empire implodes much as the soviet project imploded. Lets hope this happens before the peoples of the middle east disappear like the native americans. In both cases there is only fear and loathing expressed towards the victims’ way of life and culture.
The takeover of the US by the military Industrial Zionist Allaince, combined with the complete ignorance of the general public makes any other outcome highly unlikely.
The huge danger is that the dozen or so sociopaths in AIPAC that run this country are now hell bent on instigating nuclear war and the outcome may be armaggedon.
Posted by Ali on Jun 23, 2007.
"There is an unbroken connection between the Great War, America’s unnecessary participation in it, and everything which has transpired since then all over the Middle East. It is a continuum. In Iraq, Lebanon and in Palestine, we are witnessing today the third chapter, in effect, of the European war begun in 1914”
Yeah, that’s exactly it. After the decline of the oppressive Soviet empire, much of Europe has finally returned to smaller, free states similar to those in place before 1914. I guess that marked the end of “chapter two” of the Great War.
Right about that time (1990), we then began to see more substantive shifts in the Middle East. I’m still waiting for the press to even begin to discuss what’s happening in geopolitical terms.
Beyond that, there’s been so many good books come out in recent years about Iraq and the Mid East that have been given very little attention by the U.S. press.
While we surely must blame both Republicans and Democrats in the Congress for giving Bush and the neocons a free ride on Iraq, the press continues to give them just as much of a free ride, never asking the obvious hard questions about either our goals or the historical/political context.
Posted by Gordon R. Vaughan on Jul 05, 2007.
Also by Author
Bush & Cheney: It's Time to Resign
George Tenet: Revenge of the Nerd
Investigate the Neocons
Iraq: The Web of Lies
Pulling the Trigger on Iran
Regime Change Redux
Ron Paul's Patriotic Crimethink
The Kissinger Connection
The Kissinger Pardon
Wake Me At Armageddon
IS THE CONSTITUTION OBSOLETE?
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1996/5/1996_5_12.shtml
A recent book argues that to preserve the Republic, we must stop worshiping an outmoded document
BY BERNARD A. WEISBERGER
If you write a column called “In the News” long enough, some of your subjects eventually begin to catch up with one another. This space recently (November 1995) was occupied with the past history of the struggle for the item veto, and behold, in April 1996 it ended in victory for the veto’s advocates. If the law giving Presidents the right to selectively kill individual appropriations is sustained against any Court challenge, it will mark an important constitutional change that shifts an allotment of budgetary power from Congress to the Executive. Yet it will not demand the complex process of formal amendment.
Presumably that should please Daniel Lazare, whose recent book The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy argues that the venerated eighteenth-century charter needs to be overhauled or even scrapped because it blocks the way to any modernization of American government that will give “the people” power to cope with twenty-first-century problems. Lazare sees us as complacent in the face of gridlock because of our blind faith in the Constitution.
Well! Only about a year ago [May/June 1995] another of these columns dealt with a volume by Richard B. Bernstein and Jerome Agel, Amending America, whose subtitle suggested that the adoration was only skin-deep. It was: If We Love the Constitution So Much, Why Do We Keep Trying to Change It? Plainly the two books have a very different take on how Americans really feel about the 1787 compact. Who is in the right?
If I come down on the side of Bernstein-Agel, it is not because—confession of interest—I was once a colleague of Bernstein, nor is it from a lack of sympathy with Lazare’s social-democratic orientation. But in making his case that Constitution worship embeds the feet of democracy in cement just when it needs to take giant steps, I think he has seriously misread the facts.
To begin with, he holds that the original sin was in the Constitutional Convention itself. He believes (without citing much of the record in support) that the members were bewitched by the puritanical views of an English “Country” party that automatically distrusted central government, worshiped traditional Elizabethan institutions dominated by local interests, and “feared modernization [and] progress.” So they put together a system looking back to a golden day when power was divided and traditional law was in the saddle rather than fallible majorities—a system that “rather than focusing energy ... would disperse, muffle and absorb it.”
Oh? If that was all the framers wanted, they could have left ineffectual Articles of Confederation in place. In fact their main purpose was to “focus” power in a national government strong enough to survive the jealousies of the wrangling states.
Lazare soon gets to his real indictment. The framers, who “represented the American economic and social elite,” disliked democracy but were caught in a bind: How could they maintain order and authority while giving the people power to pursue the general interest of the United States?
Their answer was to compromise. In the Preamble they gave an implied but sweeping mandate to “the People of the United States” to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, [and] promote the general Welfare”—and then they made it very hard to do those things quickly or without long arguments and more compromises.
But compromise is exactly what Lazare dislikes. He deplores the way in which the Constitution has defused disputes, “forced politicians to smooth them over, to seek common ground, to wheel and deal so that differences might be bridged.” Especially does he scorn the so-called great compromises—the waffling on slavery embodied in the rule that allowed a slave to be counted as three-fifths of a person in determining representation in the House and the creation of the Senate with equal votes for each state.
These, he says, virtually guaranteed that only a breakdown in the constitutional system could permit the eradication of slavery. But granting the anachronistic unreasonableness of the Senate—there still is no reason for Delaware to have the same two votes as Pennsylvania, not to mention California—it was that or a small-state (and slave-state) walkout and no new government at all.
By ignoring the mundane realities that shackled the convention, Lazare loads the dice and then plays with them in contrasting the peaceable abolition of slavery in Great Britain with what happened here. British abolitionists got slavery outlawed in 1833, he says, thanks to the Reform Bill of 1832, which made it “impossible to say no to a movement . . . both massive and middle class.” This ignores the political weight of the American South under any system of representation, as against that of a handful of British colonial planters with no strong parliamentary base.
It also overlooks the cultural strength of American racism; there was no “massive” or “middle class” movement to end slavery that was frustrated by the Constitution. Immediate abolitionism remained a minority view right up to 1861.
What was gaining ground was the idea of “free soil”—namely, of restricting the institution’s future expansion. The South rejected even that distant prospect, seceding when it still had thirty sure votes in the Senate (from fifteen slaveholding states out of thirty-four) to block any abolition amendment and could have maintained the barrier until there were forty-five states.
Slaveholders jumped the gun long before the genuine danger point was reached—which makes it even more certain that they would have broken up the Union even earlier in the face of an immediate threat of abolition. The Constitution simply embodied a sad political reality: Only naked power could abolish slavery while keeping the South on board.
But Lazare ignores reality when it doesn’t fit his case. Let me take another pair of examples. He holds that the 1830s were a period of “biting constitutional dictatorship ... in which Americans were prevented from acting nationally to institute internal improvements [or] create a pro-industrial economic policy.” It seems strange, therefore, that between 1830 and 1860 the nation expanded its rail network from 23 miles to 30,626 miles, increased the value of its exports from $72 million to $334 million, dredged rivers and harbors, mapped and surveyed the West, and produced enough manufactured goods to lay the foundation for what economic history rightly calls an industrial “takeoff.”
Lazare denounces the “long and tortuous” amending process, which “severely constrained” efforts to change the Constitution. But what are the facts? Once an amendment is submitted to the states, how long does it take to get the required three-fourths of them to ratify? Leave out the curious twenty-seventh (no pay raise for Congress to take effect until an election intervenes) that took from 1789 to 1992, and consider the Bill of Rights (two years and three months in an age of slow communications) as a single unit. The median time for the remaining sixteen is—can you guess?—one year.
Almost half the book is devoted to the post-1945 period, during which, Lazare insists, other democratic nations deftly modernized their political systems while we limped and tottered into our present decrepitude (apparently the flourishing fifties don’t count), dragging the anchor of the Constitution behind us. Wherein did we fail?
Well, we got a Congress increasingly ineffective because of a fragmented committee structure (not prescribed by the Constitution) and Presidents who are not so much leaders as personalities created by image makers (and what has the Constitution to do with that?). Lazare blames the Iran-contra scandal and the easy escape of the principals in it on the Constitution’s vagueness about responsibilities and punishments. That’s like blaming the banking laws for embezzlement.
Our “unraveling social fabric”? It’s partly due to “an insane jumble of conflicting [local] jurisdictions” that trip up coordinated planning to tackle interlocking problems of race, crime, poverty, deindustrialization and deurbanization. But many, if not all, of those mini-satrapies—counties, townships, school or sewage or water districts, and the like—could be combined or eliminated by the states if they so chose.
Eager to blame our failure to grapple effectively with our agonies on a presumed naive faith in our unimprovable Constitution, Lazare leaves unmentioned a few such small matters as the rise and fall of the party system (like judicial review, an interpolation not in the original Constitution); the influence of money and television in politics; the antiurban tradition generated in an agrarian past; the diverse nature of an immigrant-enriched populace; frontier individualism; the success record of free enterprise in a new and booming country.
These and many others, rather than simple-minded worship of constitutional principles, are important roots of our “paralysis.” Lazare has it backward. Culture drives politics, not the reverse. He cites Newt Gingrich to the effect that America is a “deeply conservative country” and laments that it is true “because the Ancient Constitution is a deeply conservative concept.”
On the contrary, we are a peculiar people, loving the new and the young but idealizing the past, which we constantly flee. It’s how we are, not how the Founding Fathers made us. And what the record shows is that when the will is really there, we will change the system while swearing that we are really preserving it, as we have long done.
Only by misreading that record can Lazare’s argument be sustained. I am not a constitutional fundamentalist. There are many provisions that I would willingly change. But neither do I subscribe to Lazare’s unrestrained majoritarianism, his dire warning that unless we dump present limits on the freedom of the majority to secure instant political gratification, “politics will atrophy, society will die, and civil liberties will go with it.” There are good cases for a new kind of politics, but good cases are not served by bad history.
The Constitutional Convention
http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/convention
http://www.bordc.org/resources/hess-constitution.php
The Living Constitution: Does it Work in Modern Times?
By Richard A. Hesse, Professor of Law EmeritusRemarks for the Worcester County Chapter of ACLUMOctober 29, 2005
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
So begins the document signed and proclaimed on September 17th 1788. The Constitution was a blueprint for a nation that did not yet exist. Some regarded it as a radical experiment doomed to failure. Support for it was thin at best; key states adopted it by close vote margins gained by political manipulation rather than solid agreement on concepts.
The story of the making of a nation from that blueprint is fascinating and modern historians are very good at telling it. But beyond the fascination of a good story well told is a fundamental truth. The nation has grown and prospered as no other nation has in the recorded history of the world. Among the unique features of our success is a legal and political system that imposes the rule of law on everything the government does.
Our nation, like any family that has lasted for generations, has skeletons in its closet. When one examines those embarrassing moments from our history, they frequently have a common element. The government has either ignored the rule of law or been unfaithful to the principles and values expressed in our constitution. Thus it is understandable that when the government seeks to depart from those established values and rules of law, some among us will rise up to resist and to insist that the constitutional limits on government power be enforced.
We gather tonight to honor those who have risen to speak out and to persuade fellow citizens that they must join their voice in opposition to government actions which are not faithful to the values and principles of our constitution.
Our government tells us that our country faces unparalleled threats to our national security and consequently, the constitutional safeguards to our individual liberties must be set aside. Historically, war time has generated actions by the government that would be deemed unacceptable to peace time. And we are now engaged in a “war on terror,” at least that is the claim of the national government. This combination of unparalleled threat and “war on terror” has produced a climate for permanent changes to the constitutional relationship between the government and those whom it governs.
Laws are now proposed and passed which challenge the traditional notions of constitutional protection against invasion of privacy and unreasonable search and seizure. Further, the notions of constitutional due process guaranteeing a speedy and fair trial are being sharply modified to facilitate government convenience at the expense of individual rights.
All of this might be tolerable if the changes were temporary in nature; after all, war time conditions have, in the past, produced sharp limitations on individual rights. But this “war on terror,” unlike other wars in our history has no clearly defined enemy, no clearly defined goals, and most importantly, no clearly defined end point. As the present administration has said repeatedly, this is a war that may never end. Thus those who are held without charges and without trial “for the duration of the war” are effectively given a life sentence. . James Madison in 1795, then a Congressman from Virginia, observed:
"Of all enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it compromises and develops the germ of every other. ….[T]he discretionary power of the executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people.
The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced to inequalities of fortunes and opportunities for fraud growing out of a state of war … and the degeneracy of manners and morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
The Bush Administration is not the first to take the unspoken position that the constitution is obsolete or at least, not applicable to current conditions.
But it is the first to seek more or less permanent institutional changes that will, if they survive, last indefinitely. Further the changes sought are unprecedented in their scope.
We are not without experience in this approach by our government. In recent times, the national government has been engaged in another war that will never end. The “war on drugs” has produced a never ending plea from government authorities for greater police power to invade privacy, to conduct broad searches, to gain additional advantages in prosecuting those charged with drug crimes and to lengthen the prison terms of those convicted.
Regrettably, Congress and our courts have been all too willing to set aside the wisdom and experience of the framers of our constitution and give the government the additional powers it seeks.
The results of these efforts were predictable; the experience of the constitutional framers could have told us that repression of rights is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. But alas, our elected officials paid no attention to that experience.
It is fair to ask whether our constitution is obsolete. After all, a constitutional scheme created more than 218 years ago could not have contemplated the national and international difficulties we face today. And the framers of that scheme were wise enough to include provisions for change.
And we have made some substantial changes in that scheme through that amendatory process. Consider: we have assured the right to freedom of conscience and expression; we have specified individual legal rights in civil and criminal trials while imposing limitations on government power to investigate and prosecute the accused; we have rearranged the manner in which the President and the Senate are elected to better reflect the will of the people; we have extended the right to human dignity to a whole class of persons previously regarded as property of as economic servants; we have extended and guaranteed the right to vote to women, racial minorities and young adults (who by the way, made up a majority of the population when the nation was formed); we have guaranteed basic federal rights, privileges and immunities to individuals previously at the mercy of the state political systems.
These examples offer a guide to the pattern of our society. Over the more than 200 hundred years since the framing of the constitution our “corrections” to the system have almost universally been extensions of freedom rather than retractions of freedoms granted by the founding fathers and mothers.
From this record one might conclude that if the constitutional scheme is obsolete, it is more likely to need stronger restrictions on government rather than greater government power over the individual.
But we are told our present situation presents threats not previously experienced and certainly not experienced by those who framed the constitutional rights we have come to expect. Let us briefly look at the life and times of founders to test the claim that modern threats are unique.
Were the framers abstract thinkers who idealized the relationship between the government and individuals? Did they structure a government that was not practical in times of crisis? For those who know our history these questions are almost laughable. The framers of the constitution included dedicated patriots who put their lives on the line by declaring independence from Great Britain and by taking up arms in defense of personal freedom and the right to have a voice in government.
These were men –George Washington,, Thomas Mifflin, Charles Pinckney and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Nathaniel Gorham and Rufus King – who endured the worst of the Revolutionary War era at the lost of personal fortunes and countless friends. They experienced and witnessed the measures taken by the English government to suppress what it regarded as treason, insurrection and terrorism.
And following the end of hostilities, these men saw the effect of public insecurity – sometimes producing armed resistance to government and to the rule of law. These were not academic theoreticians. These were men of action, men of practical experience with crisis; I dare say that the threats we face today pale in comparison to the threats which were a way of life for these men everyday, in every way for more than eight years.
Nor were the framers without experience in government. We must recall that the Constitutional convention was called to reform a failing system – The Article of Confederation installed in 1781. They were confronted with a failing system of government at a time when we were threatened militarily and diplomatically by the two great powers in the world- France and Britain; the states were competing with each other for land, for commercial advantage both in foreign and domestic trade; and there was some chance that either the New England states or the Southern states would cut a separate deal with Britain.
For more than five years the framers struggled without success, to make that system work. In the end, they decided to scrap their system of government and build a new one. Abstract exercises in political science did not drive them to that conclusion; rather it was practical experience.
The chief obstacle they faced was the reluctance to create a strong central government. They came by that reluctance honestly. They saw how power was exercised by the King, by the British Administration of the Colonies and for some like Benjamin Franklin, by the foreign governments in France and Holland. On the other hand, absolute state sovereignty made national government impossible.
At bottom, the task was to create a government which could unite the nation without creating a government which could oppress its people. They knew that power without limitations was tyranny yet a government without sufficient power was not worthy of support.
It is true that the framers expected protection of individual rights to be the job of the states. Thus the record of debates at the convention reveals that the overwhelming attention was paid to the relationship between the branches of government and between the federal and state governments.
This view, subsequently rejected by the ratifying conventions, was based on the belief that the national government could be held in check so that enumerating rights was unnecessary and, in fact, dangerous to the extent that broad limitations on powers not granted opened the door to the claim that the power must exist if limitations to it are set out.
Several state ratified the constitutional while urging amendments providing for the additional protection of individual rights. Congress made that a priority when it convened in 1789; it proposed 12 amendments which the states considered, adopting 10 of them as our “Bill of Rights” in 1791. Now, it must be observed that the state ratifying conventions for the Constitution and the state legislatures approving the “Bill of Rights” were not academic theoreticians either. These were practical men with constituencies to be served. Many shared the experience of the framers in war and government.
In another era of our history, government – and the constitution – faced a truly unparalleled threat. State sponsored armed insurrection in 1861 lead to the attempt of 11 states to secede from the United States.
The President and the Congress found the government figuratively and literally, located on the edge of the battlefield. The dead and wounded were brought by the thousands to hospitals in the nation’s capital. Desperate times called for desperate action. President Lincoln and the Congress responded. In the aftermath of the war, repressive government actions were rescinded and sometimes criticized as unnecessarily harsh and extreme.
And significantly, the Constitution was amended in what some have called the “Second American Revolution” to guarantee the vote, due process and equal protection of the law to all persons subject to the laws of the states. The men who fashioned those amendments were not fuzzy-headed intellectuals who were seeking some idealized form of government. They were practical politicians doing the best they could to address what they experienced as obstacles to achieving an acceptable level of justice in society.
Accountability
Of course, the Constitution is merely a piece of paper. Its worth rests in the extent to which it is made to work as a system of rights. The philosophers who studied government in the 16th and 17th Century observed that absolute power is a corrupting force. The American thinkers who struggled with a form of government for our states and nation concluded that not only must power be dispersed but some system of accountability must be built into that system.
In our constitutional system, the Courts provide the means to hold the Congress, the President and the state governments accountable to the constitutional limits.
Throughout our history the Courts have been the guardians of our liberties.
As is true with any institution, the judiciary is no better than the people who operate it.
Over history the course of judicial protection of liberty has been anything but consistent. Part of the explanation for the inconsistency is the changing attitudes toward the power of the national government to limit state invasions of individual liberty.
For the first 40 years of federal court history, national power was dominant in the view of the Court; politicians including Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Jackson did not share that view. For the next 30 years, states asserted their “sovereignty” to the extreme, culminating in a direct challenge to federal power and the Civil War.
The Civil War Amendments settled the general legal questions surrounding federal powers but the Courts construed the Amendments narrowly permitting the states considerable powers in restricting personal and civil liberties. In the post World War I era the Courts began to recognize the values expressed and implied in the Bill of Rights and for the next 50 years the federal courts were at their apex as the guardian of liberties.
Since the 1970’s the Supreme Court and hence the federal courts, have taken a much more reserved position, deferring to the legislative and executive branches to fashion individual protections. Congress, and many state legislatures, has indeed enacted categorical protections for speech and religion and protections for special classes such as disabled persons and the aged.
But in the past 20 years, a much more conservative court has ruled that Congress lacks the power to impose broad protections on the states.
With that brief excursus into history, we return to our current situation. Our liberties are held hostage to claims of national security by a government that is hostile to personal freedoms.
We are in a “war on terror” that has no end. In the name of fighting that never-ending war, Congress has enacted sweeping provisions for increased law enforcement power and restricted protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Until the politics of the Congress and of the Executive branch changes, our only protection will be the Constitution and the courts.
Will the courts allow the government to conduct secret searches? Will the government be permitted to conduct investigatory searches without a particularized warrant and without judicial authorization? Will the government be able to arrest a citizen and hold them indefinitely without charges and without a trial?
In passing let me observe that the questions I just posed have a familiar ring to them; they almost mirror the grievances against the King recited by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. But our question is whether the Constitution is suited to deal with modern problems.
As noted, our history reveals that we have faced crises before. I have cited the larger crises to demonstrate that our current crisis is hardly unique even if you compare it to war time. In fact it might be instructive to review “war time” actions by the government in dealing with national security issues. In the interest of time and focus, permit to review just one such action with which I believe you are all familiar.
In World War II, the President acting as Commander in Chief, authorized exclusion and incarceration orders for the West Coast to remove and imprison tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans, 80,000 of which were citizens of the United States. Two years after the “detainees” had been locked up, their case reached the US Supreme Court. The government won that case in a 5-4 decision over strong dissenting opinions.
Put aside the fact that we subsequently learned that the government lied and misrepresented the facts in the judicial process and the fact that the government action and the court decision came to be a national disgrace. The point is that the constitutional processes were available and functioned. I suppose it is worth noting further that due process of law does not guarantee the correct result. But Dred Scott could have told you that 150 years ago.
How does the Constitution respond to crisis like the national security threats we face?
If the claim is that the Constitution isn’t up to the task, we should at least note what the Constitution does provide. To begin, we need to understand that the Constitution is the text and the gloss put on that text by over two hundred years of judicial interpretation.
To boils things down to a manageable discussion, generally, the Constitution does not recognize “emergency” as a justification for suspending the requirements of the Constitution.
Presidents have frequently made that claim in one form or another, and in one context or another and the Court has universally rejected it. The meaning is clear; the constitutional processes are deemed adequate to deal with emergency situations.
And what are those processes? Again cutting to the chase so to speak, since almost no constitutional rights are absolute, the government can infringe those rights if and only if it can show that it has a compelling governmental interest and that its action is necessary to serve that interest.
It is not easy for the government to meet this exactly standard and that is as it should be. Infringement of constitutionally protected rights should not be easy.
The long history of government claims of national security as a justification for deprivation of rights is instructive.
From 1798 when the Alien and Sedition Acts suppressed criticism of the government policy and officials to 2001 and the US Patriot Act, the government agenda is driven, as much by partisan interests as it is by security needs.
Just like Madison Avenue selling the latest fad of over the counter medicine, politicians drum up the need in order to sell the product. As Lincoln is reported to have advised, you can fool some of the people some of the time. But sooner or later enough people cannot be fooled.
And at this point we should be reminded that the Constitution places the ultimate power in the people.
In our history, the political solution has removed restrictions on civil liberties that were enacted in times of crises; that is the solution which the Bill of Rights Defense Committee has so effectively advanced.
Over the long haul, that may be a satisfactory solution. But people sitting in prison without charges and without trial understandably, do not want to wait- nor should they have to.
And when you apply for a job ten years from now and are denied because of information in your government file which information was gathered in a secret search 10 years earlier, long haul solutions don’t help much.
Our Constitution is a piece of paper, a contract between the people and the government as some like to say. But like any other contract, it isn’t worth much if it can’t be enforced.
The terms of the contract are not obsolete nor do crisis conditions require setting the contract aside.
Its terms provide for dealing with crisis and its processes are adaptable enough to deal with contemporary problems. But your government has not asked for expedited processes to deal with the world as it exists today.
Instead it has asked to be excused from meeting constitutional standards in a broad array of situations.
The framers of our constitution created a government based on their hopes for a better, more just society. They had every reason to respond to their fears but they chose a more promising path.
We have legitimate fears today just as our founders had legitimate fears. Are we not able to deal with those fears without sacrificing our hopes for a better, more just society?
Are we less able or courageous than our forefathers?
We are better educated, more experienced and have more resources than our American ancestors.
Surely we can find the strength, courage and wisdom to establish a proper balance between liberty and security.
1955 marked the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Chief Justice John Marshall, the great lawyer, statesman and jurist who defined our constitution and establish the rule of law for our nation. In that celebration, Chief Justice Earl Warren noted Marshall’s many accomplishments then turned to the balance between stability and freedom.
For all his accomplishments, Marshall “could not perpetuate either stability or freedom. Every generation must earn those things for itself.
Our problems … are as pressing as [the problems] in the days of John Marshall and call for the same devotion to constitutional principles.” This year marks the 250th Anniversary of John Marshall’s birth and the message remains the same. Each generation must earn its freedom. Are we up to the task?
JSTOR: Our Obsolete Constitution
The essential ques- tion is the need of the third--is the Constitution obsolete? Mr. Wallace's argument under this, his main head, is by no means convincing ...Similar pages - Note this
JSTOR: Our Obsolete Constitution
University of Chicago WILLIAM W. SWEET Our Obsolete Constitution. By William Kay Wallace (New York: The John Day Company, 1932. 226 pp. Appendix. $2.00. ...Similar pages - Note this [ More results from links.jstor.org ]
Guns and the Constitution
If we have a "living Constitution" onto which courts may graft new rights, why can't they prune away obsolete ones? These are genuinely tough questions, ...www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/gunconst.htm - 9k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
And Here Is A Question That Has Become An American Obsession
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1566715.stm
Guns are deeply rooted within Swiss culture - but the gun crime rate is so low that statistics are not even kept.
The country has a population of six million, but there are estimated to be at least two million publicly-owned firearms, including about 600,000 automatic rifles and 500,000 pistols.
This is in a very large part due to Switzerland's unique system of national defence, developed over the centuries.
Instead of a standing, full-time army, the country requires every man to undergo some form of military training for a few days or weeks a year throughout most of their lives.
Between the ages of 21 and 32 men serve as frontline troops. They are given an M-57 assault rifle and 24 rounds of ammunition which they are required to keep at home.
Once discharged, men serve in the Swiss equivalent of the US National Guard, but still have to train occasionally and are given bolt rifles. Women do not have to own firearms, but are encouraged to.
Few restrictions
In addition to the government-provided arms, there are few restrictions on buying weapons. Some cantons restrict the carrying of firearms - others do not.
The government even sells off surplus weaponry to the general public when new equipment is introduced.
Guns and shooting are popular national pastimes. More than 200,000 Swiss attend national annual marksmanship competitions.
But despite the wide ownership and availability of guns, violent crime is extremely rare. There are only minimal controls at public buildings and politicians rarely have police protection.
Mark Eisenecker, a sociologist from the University of Zurich told BBC News Online that guns are "anchored" in Swiss society and that gun control is simply not an issue.
Some pro-gun groups argue that Switzerland proves their contention that there is not necessarily a link between the availability of guns and violent crime in society.
Low crime
But other commentators suggest that the reality is more complicated.
Switzerland is one of the world's richest countries, but has remained relatively isolated.
It has none of the social problems associated with gun crime seen in other industrialised countries like drugs or urban deprivation.
Despite the lack of rigid gun laws, firearms are strictly connected to a sense of collective responsibility.
From an early age Swiss men and women associate weaponry with being called to defend their country.
Gonzales says the Constitution doesn't guarantee habeas corpus ...
"The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas,'' Gonzales told Sen. - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Ed Cognoski: UT law professor says US Constitution obsolete
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml
BUSH ON THE CONSTITUTION: ‘IT’S JUST A GODDAMNED PIECE OF PAPER’ By DOUG THOMPSONDec 5, 2005, 07:53
Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “
There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”And, to the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the shit that this group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that “goddamned piece of paper” used to guarantee.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the “Constitution is an outdated document.”Put aside, for a moment, political affiliation or personal beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent. It doesn’t matter if you support the invasion or Iraq or not.
Despite our differences, the Constitution has stood for two centuries as the defining document of our government, the final source to determine “in the end ” if something is legal or right.
Every federal official - including the President - who takes an oath of office swears to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.”Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says he cringes when someone calls the Constitution a “living document.”“Oh, how I hate the phrase we have “a ‘living document,” Scalia says. “We now have a Constitution that means whatever we want it to mean. The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete’s sake.”As a judge, Scalia says, “I don’t have to prove that the Constitution is perfect; I just have to prove that it’s better than anything else.”
President Bush has proposed seven amendments to the Constitution over the last five years, including a controversial amendment to define marriage as a “union between a man and woman.” Members of Congress have proposed some 11,000 amendments over the last decade, ranging from repeal of the right to bear arms to a Constitutional ban on abortion.
Scalia says the danger of tinkering with the Constitution comes from a loss of rights.“We can take away rights just as we can grant new ones,” Scalia warns. “Don’t think that it’s a one-way street.”And don’t buy the White House hype that the USA Patriot Act is a necessary tool to fight terrorism.
It is a dangerous law that infringes on the rights of every American citizen and, as one brave aide told President Bush, something that undermines the Constitution of the United States.
But why should Bush care? After all, the Constitution is just “a goddamned piece of paper.”
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0117-29.htm
Hey Mainstream Media! Why Doesn’t Presidential Dismantling of the Constitution Warrant the Same Intense Scrutiny as Presidential Adultery?
by Andrew Bard Schmookler
Eight years ago, a president entering his sixth year in office came under suspicion: had he conducted an adulterous affair with a young intern? For months thereafter, the media could talk of little else. It was the national topic of conversation for most of that year. The House eventually impeached the president, and the Senate tried him.
Now again, a president entering his sixth year in office has come under suspicion: has he deliberately and unjustifiably violated both the Constitution and federal statutes by conducting searches without a warrant? But this suspicion is not getting anything like the kind of media attention of the Monica Lewinsky story.
Why is that?
The presidential oath of office states: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Thus the core of his job is expressed in terms of defending, not our standard of living, nor even the general welfare, but our Constitution itself.
So why was Monica more deserving of attention? None of the possible “explanations” can stand as justifications.
1) The grounds for suspecting President Bush of violating both the letter and the spirit of his oath of office are not weaker than were the grounds for suspecting President Clinton of hanky-panky with an intern.
2) The possible wrong-doing by the current president would in no way be less important for Americans to confront than the wrong-doing of his predecessor; indeed, the present suspicion against the president is precisely the kind of thing that most worried our Founding Fathers.
3) The media may assume that the American people are less interested in protecting the Constitution than in sex scandals, but they haven’t bothered to test that proposition. And even if it were true, that would not justify the failure of the press to fulfill its duty as watchdog and protector of our democracy.
Grounds for Suspicion
The president has admitted to ordering wiretaps to be conducted without getting the court warrants required by the 4th Amendment to the Constitution and by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. To justify his actions, he and his people have made two claims: first, that they had the legal authority to do so; and second, that their actions were required for the sake of national security in a time of war.
It is hardly reassuring about the moral and intellectual integrity of this administration that the legal justifications offered thus far are regarded as almost laughably flimsy by the independent legal authorities who have commented on them.
First, they’ve claimed that the congressional authorization to fight the terrorists abroad, passed in the aftermath of 9/11, also authorized domestic surveillance. But the language of the enabling legislation supports no such claim, and the record of the debate at the time suggests that the Bush administration fully understood that such authorization would require additional provisions that Congress expressly declined to enact. In addition, why would President Bush have given his subsequent (false) public reassurance that his administration abides by the requirement to get warrants before conducting searches if he felt he’d been authorized by Congress to do otherwise?
Second, the Bush administration claims that the powers constitutionally given to the president as commander-in-chief permits him to do whatever he pleases in waging war, regardless of the law or of the prerogatives of the other branches of the government. Such a claim has been widely regarded by legal scholars as baseless as a reading of the Constitution, and as antithetical to the whole spirit of our constitutional system.
Still, there could be important national security reasons for a president to violate the law. And it’s possible that the American people –whether wisely or not—would be willing to allow the president to take illegal measures if they were required to defend the nation. But here, too, there are also reasons to doubt the presidential claims that his apparently illegal actions have been required by the demands of national security.
FISA created a court especially for the purpose of issuing such warrants, and it has issued many thousands of such warrants, while refusing only four. The law even makes provision for those situations in which urgency makes it impractical to go first to court: the executive has three whole days after emergency surveillance to come to the court for its actions to be scrutinized and validated.
So what legitimate national security reason might there be that would have prevented the president from both protecting the nation and obeying the law and the Constitution?
There remain strong grounds for suspicion that the president was serving no national good, but only hijacking power that the Framers of the Constitution expressly sought to deny him. And it does not help allay our concerns that this conducting of warrantless searches fits into a "pattern of disregard” for legal restraints, both domestic and international. But if the president has a good justification, let us hear it.
In any event, why isn’t President Bush being pressed to provide justification, and why isn’t the evidence being explored publicly with the same intensity that was devoted to the Lewinsky affair?
The Most Vital of National Interests
The moral character of the president in his private life does matter. As the most prominent personal embodiment of the nation, the president inevitably is a kind of role model. So President Clinton’s dalliance was not altogether irrelevant to his fulfillment of his job as president.
But the suspicions about President Bush’s abandonment of his core oath to protect the Constitution relate to the very core of his presidential responsibilities.
As the oath makes clear, the Constitution is the heart and soul of America. It is the inner sanctum that our public servants swear to protect; the great gift that our soldiers have fought and died for, the very foundation of our national identity. Even while we Americans divide on many issues, the sanctity of the Constitution is what unites us. It is our core assertion to the world that “we are a nation of laws, not of men.”
In this context, what could matter more than whether the President of the United States is honoring his oath of office, or whether he is treating the Constitution as an obstacle to be casually, needlessly swept aside?
Our Founding Fathers certainly would have known that this is an absolutely major story. The system of checks and balances was not a casual thing. It was a profound vision they had on meeting the challenge of how to avoid tyranny. And, as human history shows, the avoidance of tyranny is no small accomplishment. Free and decent societies have been few.
The fourth amendment protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” represented the Founding Fathers’ understanding, based on the millennia of human history in which they were schooled, of the tools of tyranny. If the King does not need the approval of the Judge to invade the privacy of the citizen, freedom is imperiled. So “We the People” determined that the court would serve as a check and a balance against the potentially tyrannical power of the executive.
If there was no imperative need for President Bush to conduct searches without first getting a warrant, then why did he do it? Would he grab a tyrant’s powers if he didn’t have a tyrant’s intentions?
We urgently need an independent investigation to discover just what purposes were being served by these warrantless wiretaps. Was this monitoring confined to those people who might reasonably be suspected of being a terrorist threat to America? Or were people perhaps chosen as targets for surveillance simply because they were political opponents of this president and his policies?
What could be more important than to know whether the great achievement of our Founding Fathers is being dismantled? But one would hardly know anything of such vital importance was at stake from watching how our mainstream media are dealing with this possible constitutional crisis.
What Master Is the Media Serving?
Is the reason for the media’s casualness in treating this administration’s possible running roughshod over the Constitution that the media don’t think this story will grab an audience the way, say, stains on a blue dress did?
But how would they know?
Watergate certainly transfixed the nation thirty-some years ago.
If Linda Tripp’s disclosures had been given no more play than those of the NSA’s warrantless spying on Americans, would people have gotten so swept up in the that affair? And if the present suspicions of presidential usurpation of powers were getting the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that Clinton’s extramarital dalliance received, might the American people be just as engaged in this story?
Recall that the upshot of the Lewinsky affair was that the American people, while repelled by Clinton’s conduct, mostly rallied to his defense. Though the House impeached him, and the Senate tried him, the president’s approval ratings climbed to levels exceeding those preceding the scandal—presumably because the American people decided that the assault on Clinton was an even bigger scandal than the president’s inability to control his sexual impulses. This was not, a majority of the American people decided, a matter that warranted bringing to bear the heaviest of constitutional machinery to bear to remove a president.
When the Congress investigated Watergate, however, President Nixon benefited from no such rallying of popular support. The public recognized that the abuse of presidential power was a vital national concern. There is simply no evidence from the Watergate story that the defense of our political system has no “sex appeal” to the American public.
So why then do the mainstream media not treat this with the urgency that they gave to Monicagate? Is the difference perhaps not in the nature of the possible offense, but in the nature of the media’s relationship to the respective presidents? Just what master is themedia serving?
Even if the American people did prove to be slow to care, is it not the job of the media not just to pander to public interests but also to direct public attention to the important public business of the times? Is it not the ultimate job of the press not just to get ratings and make a profit but also to serve the public interest?
The danger of a tyrant arising in the executive and abusing his power was far more compelling to our Founding Fathers than the danger of our being unable to defend ourselves against foreign threats. Would our Founders have accepted, without stringent proof, that America has had to adopt the police-state tactics of this commander-in-chief to protect ourselves against outside enemies?
James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, in promoting our Constitution: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
And then there is the line widely attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
If Jefferson and Madison were alive now to see the lack of vigilance of the mainstream America media in the face of these suspected threats to our constitutional protections against tyranny, they’d turn over in their graves.
If tyranny is not stopped in its earliest stages, it only grows stronger and becomes still more difficult and dangerous to stop.
Andrew Bard Schmookler has recently launched his website devoted to understanding the roots of America’s present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states. Email to: andythebard@comcast.net
Cornell University Source Library
http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/index.php/Constitutional_law
Common Dreams NewsCenter www.commondreams.org
THE STRANGE DEATH OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: END GAME IN OHIO by Michael Keefer
www.globalresearch.ca 24 January 2005
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE501A.html
So who ever thought the 2004 U.S. presidential election had the remotest chance of being honest and democratic?
Not, one might guess, the electronic voting security experts like Ken Thompson, Roy Saltman, Rebecca Mercuri, Bruce Schneier, Doug Jones, Victoria Collier, Aviel Rubin, Lynn Landes, and Bev Harris, who have for years been warning that the new voting technology coming into use in the United States offers unprecedented opportunities for electoral fraud.[1]
Probably not Osama bin Laden, who made his much-anticipated Jack-in-the-Box video appearance three days before polling day: wearing a gold-lamé hospital gown in front of a blank shower curtain, and with a nose that looked to have been quite recently punched flat, he landed some anti-Bush shots that Rush Limbaugh and the other ring-tailed roarers of the American right were happy to interpret as a last-minute endorsement of John Kerry.[2]
And certainly not Republican Congressional Representative Peter King, who made an equally notable video statement on the afternoon of November 2nd, long before the polls closed, in the course of a White House function that seemed to have put him into a celebratory mood. "It's already over," he told the interviewer. "The election's over. We won." Asked how he knew at that early hour, King replied: "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."[3]
One of the people who took care of the counting--and who was responsible as well for some of the most decisive crookedness of the election, and the most flagrant illegalities of the post-election cover-up--is J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State.
To give the man his due, Blackwell is at once more discreet and more grotesquely Orwellian than the tipsy Congressman King. Rather than flaunting his election-stealing prowess, he has preferred to boast in a Washington Times op-ed that while the election in Ohio was not in all respects perfect ("a seven-hour wait" outside polling stations, he acknowledges, "is clearly unacceptable"), it was nonetheless "perfectly inspiring--a testament to the strength and power of our democratic system, the commitment of American voters to have their voices heard and the integrity of the process that encouraged participation and demanded fairness."[4]
Prior to the election, this versatile ironist was reported to be "coming out strong" in support of the proposal to ban same-sex marriage: in late October, Blackwell made an appearance with Pastor Rod Parsley, president of "The Center for Moral Clarity," in the course of which he edified "an energized crowd" in the "Cathedral of Praise" by telling them that the notion of same-sex couples "even defies barnyard logic [...] the barnyard knows better."[5]
But Blackwell's talent--and his affliction--goes beyond irony or hypocrisy into a more permanent state of inversion that one might think of as resembling the punishment reported by the poet Dante for religiously inflected fraud.[6] In another speech in the same week of October--the context this time being his refusal to obey a federal court order requiring him to comply with the Help America Vote Act--Blackwell compared himself, in his willingness to endure the unlikely punishment of imprisonment, to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Apostle Paul. A spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party's Voter Protection Program offered the appropriate rejoinder: "Many civil rights leaders went to jail to defend the right to vote. If this official wants to go to jail to thwart it, that would be unfortunate."[7]
The talented Mr. Blackwell has garnered praise for having launched "The Ohio Center for Civic Character: A Citizen Education Initiative of the Ohio Secretary of State." The Center's goal, "a revolution of character-building in our great state," is to be achieved by providing "today's generation of leaders" with "a shared vocabulary of character-building ethics" which Blackwell calls "Uncommon Sense."[8] It may come as no surprise that one of his most recent public appearances prior to the Bush inauguration was a lecture, delivered on January 12th, 2005 to an exclusive audience at the Scioto Country Club in rural southern Ohio, on the subject of "Ethics in Leadership."[9]
Like the unsavoury Katherine Harris, who was Florida Secretary of State in 2000 and simultaneously state Chair of the Florida Bush-Cheney campaign, Kenneth Blackwell occupied a strategic double position as Co-Chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign and Secretary of State in what analysts correctly anticipated would be the key swing state of the 2004 election. From this position, a growing body of evidence shows, he was able to oversee a partisan and racist pre-election purging of the electoral rolls,[10] a clearly partisan reduction of the number of voting precincts in counties won by Gore in 2000 (a move that helped suppress the 2004 Democratic turnout),[11] a partisan and racist misallocation of voting machines (which effectively disenfranchised tens of thousands of African-American voters),[12] a partisan and racist system of polling-place challenges (which together with electoral roll purges obliged many scores of thousands of African-Americans to vote with 'second-class-citizen' provisional ballots),[13] and a fraudulent pre-programming of touch-screen voting machines that produced a systematic 'flipping' of Democratic votes into Bush's tally or the trash can.[14]
In a nation that enforced its own laws, the misallocation of voting machines--a clear violation of the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution--would alone have sufficed to invalidate the Ohio election.
Having overseen one of the more flagrantly corrupt elections in recent American history, Blackwell and his Republican machine proceeded to "take care of the counting"--which involved a partisan and racist dismissal of scores of thousands of African-American ballots as "spoiled,"[15] a flagrantly illegal "lock-down" of the vote-tallying process in Warren County on the transparently false grounds of a supposed terrorist threat,[16] massive electronic vote-tabulation fraud in this and other south-western Ohio counties,[17] and marginally less flagrant but evidently systematic forms of 'ghost-voting' and vote theft elsewhere in the state.[18]
Blackwell then saw to it (with the active assistance of partisan Republican judges, and the passive assistance of a strangely supine Democratic Party) that no even partial recount--let alone anything resembling a voting-machine or vote-tabulator audit--could get under way prior to the selection of Ohio's Republican electors to the Electoral College.[19]
He also did his utmost to block public access to election data, ordering the Boards of Election in all eighty-eight Ohio counties to prevent public inspection of poll books until after certification of the vote, which he delayed until December 6th.[20] On December 10th, his Election Administrator, Pat Wolfe, intervened to prevent analysis of poll-book data by ordering, on Blackwell's authority, a renewed "lock-down" of voting records in Greene County and the entire state. (According to Ohio Revised Code Title XXXV Elections, Sec. 3503.26, such records are to be open to the public; Ohio Revised Code Sec. 3599.42 explicitly declares that any violation of Title XXXV "constitutes a prima facie case of election fraud....")[21]
Bizarrely enough, on the night following the statement to election observers in Greene County that all voter records in the State of Ohio were "locked down" and "not considered public records," the Greene County offices were left unlocked: when the same election observers returned at 10:15 on the morning of Saturday, December 11th, they found the building open, a light on in the office (which had not been on when it was closed on the evening of the 10th), and all of the poll books and voting machines unsecured.[22]
When at last the Green and Libertarian parties' lawyers were able to obtain a recount, Blackwell presided over one that was fully as corrupt as the election had been. Sample hand recounts were to be carried out in each county, involving randomly-selected precincts constituting at least three percent of the vote; any disagreements between the sample recount and the official tally were supposed to prompt a full county-wide hand recount. According to Green Party observers, however, a substantial proportion of Ohio's eighty-eight counties broke the law by not selecting their hand-recount precincts randomly.[23]
There is evidence, most crucially, that Triad Governmental Systems, the private corporation responsible for servicing the vote-tabulation machines in about half of the state, tampered with selected machines in counties across Ohio immediately before the recount in order to ensure that the sample recount tallies would conform with the official vote tallies.[24] (Triad's technicians knew which machines to tamper with because, it would appear, Board of Election officials, in open violation of the law, told them which precincts had been pre-selected.)
Despite this widespread tampering, there were discrepancies in at least six counties between the sample hand recounts and the official tallies--and yet the Board of Elections refused to conduct full county-wide hand recounts.[25] As David Swanson writes,
"Only one county conducted a full hand recount, which resulted in 6 percent more votes than in the original vote. Those extra votes were evenly split between Kerry and Bush, but--even assuming that one county's votes have now been properly counted--how do we know where votes in the other 87 counties would fall? Should an extra several percent of them show up, and should they be weighted toward Kerry, the election would not have yet been what the media keeps telling us it is: over.[26]
Although required by law as Secretary of State to investigate electoral irregularities, Blackwell consistently refused to do so. He refused to respond to a formal letter from John Conyers and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus itemizing a host of alleged improprieties and asking what he had done to correct or investigate them. He also refused to testify in lawsuits against him arising from the election and its aftermath--in the expectation, no doubt, that any cases not declared moot once George W. Bush was safely reconfirmed as president by the votes of the Electoral College and of Congress would be dealt with by higher courts dominated by Republican judges.
Katherine Harris's reward for her work in throwing the 2000 Florida election to Bush was a safe seat in Congress. Kenneth Blackwell has named his prize: he wants to be Governor of Ohio. In a post-election fundraising letter soliciting funds for his governorship campaign, he takes credit for delivering Ohio to George W. Bush--and thus, since Ohio decided the national outcome, for ensuring his second term as president:
"I have no doubt the strong campaign we helped the President run in Ohio--coupled with a similar effort I helped deliver for State Issue One (the Marriage Protection Amendment)--can easily be credited with turning out record numbers of conservatives and evangelicals on Election Day. [....] And, I draw great satisfaction in hearing liberal members of the media credit the Marriage Protection Amendment as [the] single most important factor that drove President Bush over the top in Ohio."
In the same letter, true to the general inversion of his world view, Blackwell takes credit for his success in preventing electoral fraud:
"I have never shied away from the giving the liberals fits. And I'm sure that with all the potential voter-fraud we prevented during this last election, they will be looking to get even with me in my next political campaign. [....] As Secretary of State, I have been sued almost 30 times since this summer because I stood up for the rights of voters like you and against liberal trial lawyers and activist judges who wanted to give this election to Senator Kerry. [....] When the ACLU and the other members of the radical left worked to stop me from cracking down and prohibiting outrageous ways to commit voter fraud, I fought back and won."[27]
But what precisely does it mean to say that lawyers and judges who sought to protect the rights of minority voters from Blackwell's manifold vote-suppression tactics would have 'given' the election to Kerry? This sounds rather like a coded acknowledgment of a Republican truth that was, notoriously, voiced openly in July 2004 by a Republican state representative in nearby Michigan: "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote"--for Ohio, substitute the Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, or Toledo vote--"we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle."[28]
The Ohio recount of the presidential vote was declared officially terminated on December 28th, a day that in the Roman Catholic calendar of saints commemorates the Slaughter of the Innocents. With a derisory alteration of the official count (Kerry received an additional 734 votes, and Bush 449), George W. Bush retained a certified victory margin in Ohio of 118,755 votes--still large enough to look decisive, though well down from the lead of over 136,000 he was credited with in the first official tallies. As Bob Fitrakis, Steven Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman have remarked, the end came
"amidst bitter dispute over official certification of impossible voter turnout numbers, over the refusal of Ohio's Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice to recuse himself from crucial court challenges involving his own re-election campaign, over the Republican Secretary of State's refusal to testify under subpoena, over apparent tampering with tabulation machines, over more than 100,000 provisional and machine-rejected ballots left uncounted, over major discrepancies in certified vote counts and turnout ratios, and over a wide range of unresolved disputes that continue to leave the true outcome of Ohio's presidential vote in serious doubt."[29]
The end to the post-election process as a whole came on January 6th, 2005, when the United States House of Representatives and Senate, the assembled Congress of the American republic, voted to ratify the votes cast by the Electoral College--an act which formally made George W. Bush President for the next four years.
What is normally a purely ceremonial state occasion was interrupted, this year, by the brief irruption of a more authentic form of human dignity. Ohio Democratic Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, supported by California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, rose to challenge the Ohio results, thereby forcing the Senate and House of Representatives to separate in order to conduct, in Tubbs-Jones' words, "a formal and legitimate debate about election irregularities," and to engage, if only for the two hours prescribed for such a debate, with the arguments of those Democratic representatives and senators whose sense of ethics and of duty had led them to join what Boxer called "the fight for electoral justice."[30]
As Mark Weisbrot wrote in an article published by the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, Republican lawmakers responded to Senator Boxer, and to Representative Tubbs-Jones and her colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, "with howls of derision."[31] Some engaged in ad hominem tactics, labeling the objections "base" and "outrageous" (David Hobson, R-Ohio), and calling the objectors "aspiring fantasy authors" of "wild conspiracy theories," whose behaviour exemplified "their party's primary strategy to obstruct, to divide, to destroy" (Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio).
Others denounced the debate itself as "a travesty" (Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania), a "squandering [of the Senate's] time" by people "who persist in beating a dead horse" (Senator George Voinovich, R-Ohio); or, more gravely, as an exercise that "in the midst of a global war on terrorism [...] clearly emboldens those who would in fact undermine the prospect of democracy" (David Dreier (R-California), and "an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy" by the "X-Files wing" of the Democratic Party (Tom DeLay, R-Texas).
Out of this sound and fury there emerged the dim outline of a theory of Democracy-as-Confidence-Trick--according to which criticism must be silenced because, as House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Missouri) put it,
"Every time we attack the process, we cast that doubt on that fabric of democracy that is so important. People do have to have confidence that the process works in a proper way. They don't need to believe that it is absolutely perfect because after all it's the greatest democracy in the history of the world. And it's run by people who step forward and make a system work in ways that nobody would believe until they see it [...]."
Take away the pseudo-democratic pieties, and what's left as sub-text is a simpler message. In the laconic formulation of Ric Keller (R-Florida): "Get over it."[32]
An overwhelming majority in Congress was anxious to do just that. Ohio's Electoral College votes, together with those from all the other states, were ratified by votes of 267 to 31 in the House of Representatives, and 74 to 1 in the Senate.
What, exactly, were these large majorities agreeing to "get over"? Residual stirrings of anger--or possibly, on the Republican side, of conscience--over the fact that for the second time in a row a presidential election has been marked by appalling levels of corruption and fraud?
Ah, but while Al Gore won the popular vote nationwide in the 2000 election by some 540,000 votes--and would, it seems, have won Florida too, had the Supreme Court not intervened to stop the vote count, by as many as 23,000 votes[33]--aren't things different this time? Ohio this time may have been a mess--no one's "absolutely perfect," even in "the greatest democracy in the history of the world"--but didn't George W. Bush win the nationwide popular vote in November 2004 by several million votes?
Do you really think so? How interesting. How--let me borrow a term from the lexicon of George W. Bush's newly confirmed Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales--how "quaint."
Ohio was the swing state of swing states on November 2nd, 2004, the one whose twenty Electoral College votes decided the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. It is therefore a matter of some significance that the testimonial evidence of corruption in the Ohio election is corroborated by statistical evidence which shows the election in this state--and nationwide--to have been not just corrupt, but stolen.
The evidence in both categories is massively complex. But thanks to the no less massive analytical labours over the past two months of citizen pro-democracy activists, of social scientists, of mathematicians and statisticians, of computer programmers, and of alternative-media investigative journalists, it can nonetheless be conveniently summarized.
You want smoking guns? Here they are, starting with the evidence that John F. Kerry, and not George W. Bush, won the state of Ohio.
1. Uncounted punch-card and provisional ballots.
Well over 13,000 Ohio provisional ballots were never counted, and 92,672 regular punch-card ballots were set aside by vote-counting machines as indicating no choice for president. Thus, even after Ohio's supposed recount, a total of over 106,000 ballots remained uncounted--though there was "no legal reason for not inspecting and counting each of these ballots."[34] But there seems to have been a very good political reason for not doing so: the uncounted ballots came disproportionately from places like the cities of Cincinnati, Cleveland and Akron, all of which voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats.
2. Fraud through default settings on touch-screen voting machines.
Some 15 percent of Ohio's votes were cast using the new touch-screen voting machines. In the city of Youngstown, in Mahoning County, there were repeated complaints about what election observers referred to as "vote flipping" by the ES&S Ivotronic touch-screen machines used there. This "flipping" phenomenon, also widely observed in other states, typically appeared to poll watchers "like a mere computer glitch, no different than a super market checkout machine that records an incorrect price for lettuce."[35]
But what was happening, in the vast majority of cases, was no "glitch." As Dom Stasi notes, "The laws of probability demand that multiple random errors trend toward even distribution, but only if they are truly errors."[36] Yet in all of the published accounts of vote flipping, the "errors" consistently favoured Bush: voters who were trying to vote for Kerry found their votes being given to Bush, transferred to third-party candidates, or simply erased.[37]
The Chairman of the Mahoning County Board of Elections is reported to have stated that "20 to 30 machines [...] needed to be recalibrated during the voting process."[38] He is not quoted as saying that any action was taken, or could be taken, to compensate for the machines' one-way errors--and there is evidence that many other machines were left uncorrected.
It is clearly not the case, as one Youngstown poll worker claimed, that the repeated anomalies were due to the machines being "temperamental." A supermarket checkout machine doesn't charge ten dollars for a tin of sardines because it's having a bad hair day: it does so because that's what it has been (perhaps mistakenly) programmed to charge.
Similarly, ES&S machines flipped votes from Kerry to Bush because, as Richard Hayes Phillips proposes, they had been given "preselected default settings" that made them do so. And if they flipped votes in an apparently "temperamental" manner, 'acting up' only for every fourth or fifth or tenth voter, that would be a sign, not of electronic hissy fits, but of their having been programmed to move at preset intervals to the default setting.
One of the six machines in Youngstown's precinct 5G appears to have had a default setting for no vote at all. It may have been single-handedly responsible for the fact that nearly 14 percent of the ballots cast in this precinct (where the votes were running in Kerry's favour in a ratio of 12 to 1) were "undervotes," that is, votes cast with no preference for president.[39]
Elsewhere, the subtler effect of many machines moving at intervals to their default settings would have been a gently tidal lifting of the Republican vote tallies by thousands of stolen votes.[40]
3. 'Ghost' absentee voters in Trumbull County.
What appears to be a similar effect of widely diffused fraud came to light in Trumbull County when Dr. Werner Lange undertook the labour of inspecting 106 of the county's precinct poll books. Among the absentee votes listed in these books he found a total of 580 apparent 'ghost' votes--that is, "absentee votes for which there were no absentee voters identified." In other words, there were on average 5.5 faked absentee votes in each of the precinct books he checked. The number may not seem significant, but this level of faked absentee votes, if it turned out to have been reproduced across the state of Ohio, would have resulted in a total of over 62,000 faked votes.[41]
Just how widespread this particular form of cheating was we may never know, since it appears that in many counties the electoral data is now being destroyed.
Lange's evidence has been challenged by Russ Baker, who in a study financed by "the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute" describes himself as "an old-style investigative reporter." The 'investigation' in this instance didn't go beyond accepting the explanation of a Trumbull County official "that the poll books Lange looked at had been printed before absentee voting ended--including those who voted in the final days before the election at the Board's offices. The books would--according to practice--be updated to include everyone."[42]
But the investigator, bless his gum shoes, seems not to have understood what is at issue. Lange writes that his study "would have been completed weeks earlier if Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell [...] had not unlawfully ordered all 88 boards of elections to prevent public inspection of poll books until after the certification of the vote." In other words, much if not all of his inspection of poll books was carried out after the official certification of the Ohio vote on December 6th--and thus more than a month after election day. When, if not at the time their votes were recorded, does Baker imagine that the identities of absentee voters would be recorded in the poll books?
4. Implausible voter turnout figures.
In Franklin County, which includes the city of Columbus, voter turnout figures in the 125 precincts won by Bush were on average nearly 10 percent higher than in the 346 precincts won by Kerry: the median turnout in Bush precincts was 60.56 percent; in Kerry precincts it was 50.78 percent.[43] Though the wide turnout differences here and in Ohio's other largely urban counties may be ascribed in large part to Kenneth Blackwell's vote-suppression tactics, including the partisan misallocation of voting machines, they have also raised suspicions that large numbers of Kerry votes went unrecorded.
These suspicions are strengthened by the certified reports from pro-Kerry Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County, of precincts with turnouts of as few as 22.31 percent (precinct 6B), 21.43 percent (13O), 20.07 percent (13F), 14.59 percent (13D), and 7.85 percent (6C) of the registered voters.[44] Thousands of people in these precincts lined up for many hours in the rain in order, it would appear, not to vote.
Meanwhile, in pro-Bush Perry County, the voting records certified by Secretary of State Blackwell included two precincts with reported turnouts of 124.4 and 124.0 percent of the registered voters, while in pro-Bush Miami County, there were precincts whose certified turnouts, if not physically impossible, were only slightly less improbable.[45] These and other instances of implausibly high turnouts in precincts won by Bush, and implausibly low turnouts in precincts won by Kerry, are strongly suggestive of widespread tampering with the vote-tabulation processes.
Similarly anomalous patterns of differences in voter turnout have been detected by Richard Hayes Phillips in Lucas County, which includes the city of Toledo. In this case, the story has a piquant twist: thieves broke into Lucas County Democratic Headquarters on the night of October 12th, and stole computers containing all of the party's local organizing and get-out-the-vote plans. It comes as no surprise that vote-tabulation manipulations in Toledo--and election-day vote-suppression efforts as well--appear to have been particularly well-focused.[46]
5. Vote-tabulation fraud in Miami County.
The fact that Miami County reported two successive sets of returns on election night attracted suspicion from the start. The county's initial figures, with 100 percent of the precincts reporting, seemed improbably low, with 31,620 votes cast--only about three-quarters as many as in the 2000 election. But the second total, when it came in late on election night, seemed improbably high--50,235 votes cast altogether--as well as being peculiarly tidy in two respects: John Kerry's share of the vote remained, to one-hundredth of one percent, exactly what it had been in the first set of returns (33.92 percent); and George W. Bush was shown to have won the county by exactly 16,000 votes.
The final certified figures (which include 1,542 provisional ballots added to the total) provided further surprises. In a county whose population had increased by only 1.38 percent since 2000, the number of votes cast rose by a whopping 20.86 percent. Bush's margin of victory over Kerry in the county was larger by 7.3 percent than his margin of victory over Gore had been in 2000, meaning either that the county swung strongly in Bush's favour, or else that he succeeded in capturing an overwhelming proportion--well over 90 percent--of the nearly 9,000 additional voters.
A third possibility also presents itself: namely, that a substantial number of the people who voted for George Bush in Miami County in 2004 do not in fact exist.
Richard Hayes Phillips proposes that the Miami County returns are riddled with fraud--sometimes rather sloppy fraud, as when the precincts of Concord South and Concord South West reported voter turnouts of 94.27 and 98.55 percent respectively, while in adjoining Concord South East the turnout amounted to only 56.55 percent of registered voters.[47] (The Concord South West turnout figure means, by the way, that only ten registered voters failed to vote--though more than that number of voters in the precinct have signed affidavits testifying that they did not vote.)[48]
6. Vote-tabulation fraud in Warren, Butler, Clermont (and other) Counties.
There is strong evidence of large-scale vote-tabulation fraud in these three contiguous and traditionally Republican counties in southwestern Ohio. The comparisons between the 2000 and 2004 figures that Richard Hayes Phillips provides are instructive.
In Warren County, the population increased by 14.75%, the number of registered voters increased by 29.66%, voter turnout increased by 33.55%, Bush's point spread increased from 42.24% to 44.58%, and Bush's victory margin increased from 29,176 votes to 41,124 votes.
In Clermont County[...], the population increased by 4.39%, the number of registered voters increased by 10.20%, voter turnout increased by 24.86%, Bush's point spread increased from 37.50% to 41.69%, and Bush's victory margin increased from 26,202 votes to 36,376 votes.
In Butler County[...], the population increased by 3.12%, the number of registered voters increased by 10.06%, voter turnout increased by 18.18%, Bush's point spread increased from 29.40% to 32.52%, and Bush's victory margin increased from 40,197 votes to 52,550 votes.[49]
These figures are vehemently to be suspected, not least because of the election-night "lock-down" of the Warren County administrative building--an event which may suggest that the team responsible for ensuring that Bush's Ohio vote tallies added up to a convincing victory was at work behind those locked doors, and didn't want their earnest meditations to be disturbed by election observers, journalists, or 'terrorists' of any kind.
At the precinct level, dubious figures throughout these three counties cry out for detailed investigation.
For example, in Butler County's St. Clair Township, where voter turnout rose by 8.27 percent, Kerry received exactly 10.00 percent fewer votes than Gore had in 2000; while in two precincts of Liberty Township (which accounted for a quarter of the purported increase in Bush's margin of victory in Butler County, the numbers of registered voters are said to have risen since 2000 from 660 to 1,834 (an increase of 177.9 percent) and from 596 to 1,451 (an increase of 143.5 percent).
A more distinct marker of fraud is the fact that in all three counties C. Ellen Connally, a comparatively little-known African-American municipal judge from Cleveland who was running as a Democrat for the position of Chief Justice against a well-funded Republican incumbent, Thomas Moyer, received significantly more votes than did the Kerry-Edwards ticket--in Butler County, 5,347 more, and in Clermont County, 4,146 more votes. As Congressman John Conyers and his colleagues emphasized in their letter of December 2nd to Secretary of State Blackwell, this is a bizarre anomaly:
"Have you examined how an underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate could receive so many more votes in Butler County than the Kerry-Edwards ticket? If so, could you provide us with the results of your examination? Is there any precedent in Ohio for a downballot candidate receiving on a percentage or absolute basis so many more votes than the presidential candidate of the same party in this or any other presidential election? Please let us know if any other County in Ohio registered such a disparity on a percentage or absolute basis."[50]
Blackwell, needless to say, did not respond to these questions. But as Conyers and his researchers went on to discover for themselves, the obscure Judge Connally did in fact out-poll the Democratic presidential candidate in seven other Ohio counties: Auglaize, Brown, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, and Putnam Counties.[51]
If this "disparity" of Connally out-polling Kerry is a sign that Kerry votes were being discarded or switched to Bush through vote-tabulation fraud in Butler, Clermont and Warren Counties, then it is also a marker of electoral fraud in these other counties as well.
7. Doing the sums: one analyst's estimate.
After conducting precinct-by-precinct analyses of statistical anomalies in the election results "in fifteen Ohio counties accounting for 62% of the registered voters in the state," Richard Hayes Phillips determined that, on a conservative estimate, "the reported margin of victory for George W. Bush in the State of Ohio is inflated by 101,020 votes." This estimate, in addition to being conservative, is also incomplete.
Phillips remarks that "These studies were conducted under time constraints and with such evidence as Ohio officials were willing to provide.
Even in the counties that I have analyzed, I have examined only certain aspects of a well-orchestrated and multi-faceted plan to undermine democracy in Ohio." Emphasizing, in conclusion, that he has yet to analyze the data from seventy-three of Ohio's eighty-eight counties, Phillips implies that the manifold forms of electoral fraud and vote suppression identified were sufficient to divert to Bush what would have been, in a clean election, a clear Kerry victory.[52]
8. Cuyahoga County: other kinds of fraud.
In moving on to evidence beyond that which Richard Hayes Phillips took into account, I need first to explain one very large-scale false alarm. The election results published by Cuyahoga County (which includes the city of Cleveland) led a number of commentators in November 2004--myself among them--to believe that there had been massive 'ghost-voting' fraud in the suburbs of Cleveland.[53]
But the official lists showing twenty-nine communities with voter turnout figures of more than 100 percent (and hence some 93,000 'ghost votes' in the county) turned out to result from a bizarrely structured software program that grouped communities in the same congressional, house and state senate districts, and added the total number of absentee ballots within the combined districts to the voter turnout figures for each community in these districts-though not to the vote totals for candidates or issues.[54]
This programming oddity worked, the County's website idiotically declared, in "even-numbered years." What its intended function might have been is hard to say. It could have been a piece of innocent stupidity, or the residue of an abandoned ghost-voting scheme--or even a Karl Rovian fool-catcher, designed to set the blogosphere alight with easily extinguished flames.
But other, more subtle, forms of electoral corruption now appear to have been detected in the Cuyahoga County returns.
As may have been observed, the statistically-informed analyses of Richard Hayes Phillips are open to the objection that some of his judgments are, in the end, no more than subjective.
Many of the anomalies he swings at are, without question, home-run pitches: the voter turnout figures in Concord, Miami County, for example, amount to a fast ball over the plate that Phillips hits over the back fence.
In other instances, as in Warren County and the adjoining counties of southwestern Ohio, his analyses are corroborated by evidence like the Judge Connally disparity. There may be further cases, though, in which a skeptical reader might well ask for firmer evidence of fraud than one analyst's "professional judgment." Two recently published studies of the Cuyahoga County data appear to offer methods of analysis that could be usefully applied to the election returns from other Ohio counties--and, quite possibly, from other states as well.
The first establishes the likelihood that what observers thought to be mere incompetence in the conduct of the election in Cleveland was actually a deliberately designed feature intended to throw large numbers of votes from Kerry to Bush; the second, if its "reverse-engineering" programming analysis can be confirmed, would show that a significant number of the official precinct vote-tallies in this county--and perhaps in many others--were fraudulently generated by a hacker.
James Q. Jacobs' still ongoing work with the Cuyahoga County data reveals a significant connection between two apparently disparate features of the election: the fact that odd and wholly implausible clumps of votes in certain precincts went to third-party candidates in a manner that some observers have thought must point to computer hacking; and the fact, noted with frustration by many voters and election-day observers, that in many instances the same polling place was used for two or more voting precincts, and that because of inadequate or nonexistent precinct labeling, significant numbers of voters found themselves in the wrong line-ups.
Jacobs demonstrates a connection between the two: the anomalous third-party votes arose from the fact that the punch-card ballots given to voters in adjoining precincts listed the presidential candidates in different sequences. What he calls "precinct cross-voting" led to many ballots being counted by machines that were coded to attribute punch-marks in a manner differing from the printed sequence of candidates' names on the ballots.
As Jacobs' detailed and statistically sophisticated analysis shows, the result was a steady diversion of votes from Kerry, the candidate favoured by an overwhelming majority of Cleveland voters, to Bush and to third-party candidates.[55] What at first seems no more than spectacularly incompetent election design appears, on reflection, more likely to have been intended to produce exactly this effect.
But if the clumps of third-party votes seem not to have been the result of hackers moving votes about and leaving some of them parked with third-party candidates, that doesn't mean that hacking was not taking place.
Another analysis that may have wide potential applicability has been published at the Democratic Underground website by a computer programmer who claims to have special expertise in the reverse-engineering of calculations, and who goes by the blogger cognomen of '59sunburst.' (Because this analysis has been anonymously published--and because, moreover, I have been unable to activate the author's link to a field of supporting data--I present it with due reservations, in the hope that those possessing programming expertise may be able to critically assess its validity.)
Finding it curious that in 46 Cuyahoga County precincts George Bush received the same number of votes in 2004 as in 2000, while only in 12 precincts did John Kerry receive the same number of votes that Al Gore did in 2000, '59sunburst' speculated that Bush's 2000 numbers in each precinct might somehow have been used "as a benchmark for altering the results of 2004"--with a putative hacker's goal being to ensure that Bush's 2000 level of support was either maintained or enhanced. '59sunburst' was able to develop a quite simple mathematical formula which made it possible "to calculate Kerry's and Bush's 2004 totals for over 400 precincts using Bush's 2000 numbers and a randomizing factor"; this formula, s/he claims, works both for the preliminary results published on November 8th and the final results published by Cuyahoga County's Board of Elections on November 30th.
After demonstrating, with figures from Cleveland precinct 1M, how the formula generates Bush's and Kerry's 2004 vote tallies for both the November 8th and the November 30th reports out of the Bush 2000 vote count and the number of votes cast in 2004, '59sunburst' anticipates the obvious objection: If you throw the right randomizing factor into such a calculation, "you can make anything come out the way you want it to."
True--but it appears that someone was indeed making things come out the way he wanted to on election night. For, as it happens, Cleveland precinct 1N--the very next one on the list--requires the very same "randomizing factor" as precinct 1M (Factor: 0.0618) for the formula to work. The same phenomenon recurs repeatedly with other pairs (or triplets) of consecutively listed precincts: Cleveland 6G and 6H (Factor: 0.005), Cleveland 10D and 10E (Factor: 0.024), Cleveland Heights 3C and 3D (Factor: 0.0267), East Cleveland 2E and 2F (Factor: 0.0263), East Cleveland 2H and 3A (Factor: 0.0241), East Cleveland 3B, 3C, and 3D (Factor: 0.0158), and so on.[56]
If the "randomizing factor" numbers were different in each precinct, or only randomly coincided, there would be no reason to suspect a hacker's presence. What gives the game away is the reappearance of the same numbers in successive precincts--an obvious economizing of effort on the part of a hacker whose sticky fingerprints on the Cuyahoga County returns are made visible by that very fact. The effects of this hacking appear to have been substantial: in the first pair of precincts discussed by '59sunburst' alone, Bush's tally rose from 2 votes in 2000 to 23 in 2004 (precinct 1M), and from 2 votes in 2000 to 32 in 2004 (precinct 1N).
8. The Ohio exit poll.
The November 2nd exit poll showed with some clarity the scale of the Republican Party's electoral fraud in Ohio. When I gathered the Ohio exit poll data from CNN's website at 7:32 p.m. EST on election day, women voters (53 percent of the total) were reported as favouring Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 47 percent, while male voters (47 percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 51 percent to 49 percent. The exit poll thus showed Kerry winning Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percent, with 52.1 percent of the vote to Bush's 47.9 percent.[57]
According to the official vote tally, however, George W. Bush carried Ohio with 51 percent of the vote to John Kerry's 48.5 percent--with a winning margin, that is, of 2.5 percent. (Subsequent adjustments to the tally as absentee and provisional ballots were counted cut the margin of victory from 2.5 to 2 percent.)
But do exit polls mean anything at all? According to the collective wisdom of political pundits in the U.S. corporate media, the Ohio exit poll--like the national exit poll, which showed John Kerry, not George W. Bush, winning the popular vote nationwide by a margin of 2.56 percent[58]--must simply have been wrong. Set aside the fact that professionally conducted exit polls have been repeatedly shown to have a high degree of accuracy (significantly higher than that of any other kind of polling).
Set aside the fact that the 2004 polls were conducted with elaborate professional care by one of the most highly respected pollsters in the business. Set aside as well the very peculiar fact that all of the divergences between exit polls and vote tallies in the swing states in the 2004 election favoured George W. Bush--often by amounts far outside the statistical margins of error--and the further fact that none of the (frankly implausible) explanations put forward to deal with this statistical anomaly have been supported by the smallest shred of evidence.[59]
Perhaps we should also avoid any mention of the high-toned denunciations of electoral fraud delivered by George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Republican Senators Richard Lugar and John McCain following the second-round presidential election in Ukraine on November 21st, 2004. For what was the key evidence adduced in this chorus of denunciations? And why were these Republican statesmen threatening Ukraine with diplomatic isolation and economic penalties if the election results were allowed to stand? Because there was a wide divergence in Ukraine between the exit polls, which gave Viktor Yushchenko a commanding lead, and the official vote tally, according to which the election was narrowly won by his pro-Russian rival, Viktor Yanukovich.
Those who have not yet wholly averted their eyes from the matter might want to note that the divergence between the second-round vote tally in Ukraine and what seems to be the more trustworthy of the second-round Ukrainian exit polls was 6.2 percent.[60] By an odd coincidence, the divergence between the exit poll result and the final vote tally in Ohio was exactly the same: 6.2 percent.
If George W. Bush didn't win the vote tally in Ohio--and the evidence that he didn't is cumulatively overwhelming--then he didn't properly win the Electoral College vote either.
And the popular vote? For the sake of completeness, and of decency, let's briefly lay to rest the idea that some tattered shreds of democratic legitimacy can be reclaimed for Bush's presidency through the pretense that he must, after all, have won the popular vote on November 2nd.
I am not going to rehearse here any part of the rapidly accumulating body of analyses that shows Republican electoral fraud to have been carried out in many other states from coast to coast with much the same energy and inventiveness as in Ohio.[61] For as the mathematician who posts his analyses of exit poll data at the Democratic Underground site under the name 'TruthIsAll' has intimated, and as Dr. Steven F. Freeman has shown in a major new study which he has kindly shared with me in draft form, there is a simpler way of showing that, in the big picture, the numbers which underlie Bush's supposed victory in the popular vote simply don't add up.[62]
In comparison to the election of 2000, there were two dramatic changes in 2004: an increase of some 14 percent in the total number of votes cast (which rose from 105,405,000 in 2000 to 120,255,000 in 2004), and a significant decline in the proportion of votes cast for third-party candidates (which sank from 3,949,000 in 2000 to 1,170,000 in 2004). According to the national exit poll data made available by CNN on the evening of November 2nd, 83 percent of those who voted in 2004 had also voted in 2000. This means, in slightly different terms, that nearly 100 million people who voted in 2000, or close to 95 percent of the 2000 voters, also cast ballots in 2004.[63] In the 2004 exit poll, 13,047 randomly selected respondents stated that they had voted as follows:
Bush Kerry
Gore 2000 voters: 8% 91%
Bush 2000 voters: 90% 10%
Other 2000 voters: 17% 64%
New voters: 41% 57%
Al Gore, remember, won the popular vote in 2000 by almost 544,000 votes (50,999,897 votes to George Bush's 50,456,002). Assuming that the 8 percent of Gore voters who migrated to Bush's camp in 2004 more or less cancel out the 10 percent of Bush-2000 voters who swung to Kerry, one can take the base number of supporters for Bush and Kerry in 2004 as amounting to 95 percent of the Republican and Democratic presidential vote tallies in 2000--or, in round numbers, 48.4 million votes for Kerry and 47.9 million votes for Bush.
If 95 percent of the 3,949,000 who voted for third-party candidates in 2000 also voted in 2004, then given that 64 percent of these people voted for Kerry and 17 percent for Bush, that, in round numbers, would add 2.3 million votes to Kerry's expected total and 600,000 to Bush's, raising them to 50.7 million for Kerry and 48.5 million for Bush.
Add in the 20.2 million new voters, 57 percent of whose ballots, according to the exit poll, went to Kerry, and 41 percent to Bush. That means 11.5 million additional votes for Kerry, and 8.3 million additional votes for Bush. The final expected total comes out to 62.2 million votes for Kerry, and 56.8 million expected votes for Bush.
Compare these numbers to the official results: 61,194,773 votes (or 51 percent of the total votes cast) for George W. Bush, and 57,890,314 (or 48 percent) for John Kerry. The discrepancies are striking: Bush appears to have received 4.4 million more votes than he should have, and Kerry 4.3 million fewer than he should have.
The magic--as Congressman Peter King, whom I quoted at the outset, evidently understood--is in the counting. As a large and growing body of evidence makes clear, the official tallies of the 2004 presidential election are to an unprecedented degree distorted by fraud, much of it carried out through widespread and systematic tampering with electronic vote-tabulation machines.
There is, of course, another magic as well, whose secrets reside in all the manifold ways of not counting. In December 2000, Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, a leading expert in issues of electronic voting-technology security, together with Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, estimated that at least two million of the ballots cast in that year's presidential election never got counted. In the words of the journalists who reported this estimate: "That would disenfranchise a city the size of Houston."[64] How large a city has been disenfranchised this time round, if in Ohio alone 106,000 ballots went uncounted?
And finally, there is the shabbiest magic of all--the magic of the corporate-media hacks and think-tank trolls, whose collective mission it is to conjure away the most glaring evidence, normalize the abnormal, and twist or bludgeon critical thinking into conformity.
What this adds up to, I have suggested in my title, is the death of American democracy. A strange death, because so many Americans, for good reasons and for bad, refuse to acknowledge that it has taken place.
The good reasons--those of the many thousand pro-democracy activists who remain fiercely attached to the rights and freedoms that are theirs by inheritance and struggle, who have uncovered through patient study the details of the theft, and who are seeking through firm public action to reassert the dignity and reclaim the stolen voices of those many hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens deliberately abjected and silenced by fraud--these one must honour. One can honour as well the activists' wit and their defiant good humour--evident, for example, in the placards carried in a demonstration in Denver on November 11th (Remembrance Day, in this country):
"Dude, Where Did My Vote Go?"
"Vote Free or Die Bold"
"Correct Electile Dysfunction"
"Corporations Cannot Run Elections"
"The Computer Ate My Vote!"
"The Fox is Guarding the Voting Coop"
"I Do Not Concede."[65]
But let's be realistic about what it means when, with the willing complicity of all the major outlets of the corporate media, a single corporatist party controls the executive functions of the central government, including all of the security apparatus of a thoroughly militarized state, both houses of the legislature, and the judiciary--and what it means when this same party, having acquired executive power in 2000 through electoral fraud and a judicial coup d'état, and having confirmed its control of the legislature through the corrupt midterm elections of 2002, then provides a convincing demonstration in 2004 of its power to turn what should have been a landslide electoral defeat into a dubious but effectively unassailable victory.
It might be suggested that the leader himself, in his inverted Orwellian manner, gave fair warning of what the public could anticipate in his second presidential election. One of the most rightly celebrated of all 'Bushisms' was delivered in September 2002 to an audience in Nashville, Tennessee: "There's an old saying in Tennessee--I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee--that says, fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again."[66] Really? Why on earth not?
For now at least, the forms of a democratic republic remain in place--as, in a parallel way, the residual forms of the Roman Republic remained in place well after its devolution into a militarized imperial autocracy.
One of the early emperors, Tiberius, got sadistic pleasure out of writing deferential letters to the Roman Senate, humbly requesting the terrorized senators' direction and advice. (It is not recorded, though others of his missives had a similarly noxious effect, that he ever went so far as to have the envelopes dusted--did the Romans use envelopes?--with weaponized anthrax.)[67]
Tiberius's successor, known to history by the fond nickname, Caligula, given him by the Roman legionaries, likewise held the Senate in high esteem: he is said to have planned to have his horse--or was it his donkey?--elected to that august body.[68]
Notes
1 For writings by these and other critics of electronic voting technologies, see Michael Keefer, "Evidence of Fraud in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Reader," Centre for Research on Globalization (5 December 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE412A.html
2 For an incisive analysis of the Bin Laden tape, see Michel Chossudovsky, "'Intelligence Asset' bin Laden supports Bush Re-election," Centre for Research on Globalization (31 October 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO410B.html
3 King's remarks, recorded in Alex Pelosi's new film Diary of a Political Tourist, are quoted by Thom Hartmann in "Restoring Trust in the Vote," Common Dreams News Center (15 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1115-htm
4 J. Kenneth Blackwell, "How Ohio pulled it off," The Washington Times (17 November 2004), http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20041116-085742-1497r.htm
5 "Blackwell Compares Gay Couples, Farm Animals," WTOL11: Toledo's News Leader (20 October 2004), http://www.wtol.com/global/story.asp?s=2457596
6 See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XIX.
7 Gregory Korte and Jim Siegel, "Defiant Blackwell Rips Judge," Cincinnati Enquirer (22 October 2004), http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/22/loc_blackwell22.html
8 For further details see Blackwell's website, http://www.sos.oh.us/sos/occc/index.html
9 Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, "Ohio GOP election officials ducking subpoenas as Kerry enters stolen vote fray," The Free Press (28 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1046
10 For evidence of the practice of purging voter rolls, see Greg Palast, "Electoral Fraud, Ethnic Cleansing of Voter Rolls, An Election Spoiled Rotten," TomPaine.com (1 November 2004), available at http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/PAL411A.html , and Greg Moses, "The One-Two Punch of Racism: Whitewashing the Voter Fraud Issue," The Free Press (10 December 2004),
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/977 .
The flame inside us has disappeared, replaced by a cold and dark void, even as we witness firsthand the arrival of fascism and the death of democracy, even as we are witness to the end of freedom and rights and the extinction of the land once known as America. “
I think the members of the Virginian Group, of which I am a member, are in agreement that we have an Executive Branch of our government that has risen to the level of an Imperial Presidency; that the Legislative Branch has been rendered impotent to the point where it is effectively meaningless; that the Supreme Court can render no decision that the President must obey.
The Constitution has been swept aside as obsolete and has no relevance in the conduct of our government. There is no law that Executive Branch will either honor or obey if it is an impediment to its agenda.
We are faced with the most serious perversion of government in this nation’s history; a government prepared to do whatever it wills confident that there is no one, no law, no instrumentality of the American System that can stop them. They will do whatever they please until some one stops them.
We are in agreement that the very mechanisms of redress, correction and restoration inherent of The Constitution, and extant in our minds, products of our education, life experiences and expectations as Americans are no longer available to “We The People”; our system of government is a pretense serving only those people and powers that benefit from its existence and its ability to dole out power, privilege and our IRS Tribute.
We who find our government to have failed ask just what are Americans willing to do take back control of government; what are we willing to do ensure a future of liberty and freedom in this land?
In a most unusual move on this blog; I am going to introduce you to a Conservative voice you be unaware of, and present his view, in full and uninterrupted as regards the topic:
AMERICA: THE DEATH OF AMERICAN EMPIRE
FROM TAKI’S TOP DRAWER: About Taki
On February 5, 2007, journalist and socialite Taki Theodoracopulos launched Taki’s Top Drawer, (www.takimag.com), a conservative online magazine. Taki writes a column, the “High Life,” which has appeared in London’s The Spectator for the past twenty-five years.
He writes also for National Review, the Sunday Times (London), Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Quest, among others. In 2002, Taki founded The American Conservative magazine with Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell. Taki is a descendant of a titled family from the Ionian island of Zante.
His father was a self-made shipping magnate who served in both the Greek armed forces during the World War II Balkan campaign of 1940-1941 and the anti-German resistance movement. Taki was educated at the Lawrenceville School and the University of Virginia, and is married to Princess Alexandra Schoenburg.
Why start this new online magazine? According to the just-turned-70 writer—who’s fit as a fiddle, and active in competitive martial arts—“I want to shake up the stodgy world of so-called ‘conservative’ opinion.
For the past ten years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow-ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in gothic dormitories, while sipping port and smoking their father’s stolen cigars.
Thanks to the tragedy of September 11—and a compliant and dim-witted president—these kids got the chance to play Risk with real soldiers, with American soldiers. Patriotic men and women are dying over in Iraq for a war that was never in America’s interests.
And now these spitball gunners, these chicken hawks, want to attack Iran—which is no threat to the U.S. at all. One thing I can tell you for sure, there may well be some atheists in foxholes—but you’ll never find a neocon.
They prefer to send blue-collar kids out to die on their behalf, so they get to feel macho—and make up for all the times they got wedgies in prep school. It shall be our considered task to take on the chicken-hawks of this world, and give them wedgies again.”
Writers for this site will include conservative and libertarian luminaries like Paul Gottfried, R.J. Stove, Justin Raimondo, Steven Sailer, John Zmirak, Scott Richert and many others.
“We want to reflect a traditional conservatism that prefers peace with honor to proxy wars, Western civilization to multicultural barbarism, Christendom to the European Union, and Russell Kirk to Leon Trotsky.
This will undoubtedly infuriate many in the mainstream ‘conservative’ movement, who have transferred their loyalties elsewhere.
It’s time to raise their blood pressure a few points—and help them burn off some of those five-course meals they’ve been eating down on K Street,” Taki said.
The Death Of American Empire Posted by Patrick Foy on June 12, 2007
Step back and look at the big picture. The farther you step back, the bigger the picture gets. Step back too far, and the world becomes a reduction ad absurdum, resulting in a kind of Buddhism.
My departed friend Charles Bukowski wrote in one of his many poems, “We cannot acquire too much...there are laws we know nothing of.”
What prompts this avenue of thought is a gloomy editorial not too long ago in Capitol Hill Blue by its founder, Doug Thompson, out of Washington, D.C. Every once in a while, like some of us, Thompson seems to nosedive into a depression.
The title of his article ( March 9th, 2007) indicates as much: “Turn off the life support: America is dead”. Here’s a sample:
Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to pull the plug on this failed democratic republic called The United States of America. Turn off the life support. Disconnect the IVs. The US of A is brain dead with no chance for revival....
It doesn’t matter who controls Congress. Congress is a dead institution, ruled by timid legislators who no longer exercise any real role in the governing of this nation. It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court may or may not do. The President of the United States has declared himself a “war time President” and granted himself dictatorial rights that no one in Congress or the Court appears able to successfully challenge him....
We need to rethink this experiment called America. Maybe we need to start with a clean sheet of paper.... Maybe it’s time for a new American Revolution. After all, the last one started because another guy named George tried to destroy our way of life.
All of this may be accurate, but it is too idealistic. [In fact, in the interim, Thompson has toned down the article, removing some of what has just been quoted.] We do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world of the possible, the tolerable, and/or the just barely manageable. We cannot go back to the dream of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic or to its original Constitution. To attempt to halt the present day free-for-all in America and begin anew would likely make matters worse, opening the door to greater demagoguery and perhaps complete chaos.
The truth is, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. It is long gone, and nobody is particularly concerned. That optimistic framework of self-governance and independence was rendered irrelevant by the Civil War (a.k.a. The War of Northern Aggression) which lasted from 1861 to 1865. The legitimate issue of slavery aside, when half the country invades, pillages, ransacks and subjugates the other half, that event can in no way be indicative of the rule of law, and was certainly not authorized by the Constitution.
The Civil War marked the end of the American Republic of 1789.
We live in the aftermath, a postscript; we are making it up as we go along. Many wonderful and fantastic achievements have occurred during this aftermath--in the realm of inventions, science, entertainment, industry, space exploration, the arts, business, etcetera--for which Americans can justly be proud.
But many terrible things have happened as well, mostly in the governmental sector, for which Washington must take the blame, along with the citizenry who tolerated or ignored what Washington was doing.
On the foreign policy horizon, let’s keep everything in perspective and on the table. G.W. Bush, who is a modern day, real-life Charlie McCarthy, and his mentor, Richard Cheney, who corresponds to Edgar Bergen, are only symptoms of a larger problem, a mystery bigger than the aberration misnamed “neoconservatism”. Bush and Cheney are the end-products of an historical development a century in the making.
America’s current predicament on the world’s stage can be accurately diagnosed, but not so easily reversed. May I suggest that it is the result of two overly ambitious concepts in the realm of foreign affairs, which concepts have evolved over many decades, commencing around the start of the 20th Century, at the time of the Spanish-American war of 1898.
First, there was the brainstorm borrowed from the British Empire experience, innocently conceived by President William McKinley and by his idealistic Secretary of State, John Hay, that to get America directly involved in overseeing the internal affairs of other nations was a brilliant, beneficent idea for all parties concerned. Hay and McKinley did not recognized it as inherently dishonest, at odds with the tradition of a republic born in revolt against an empire.
They did not comprehend that it was meddling and officious. Soon their idea was taken for granted in the hallways of the White House, starting with Teddy Roosevelt.
By the time of Woodrow Wilson and that of his mysterious éminence grise, “Colonel” Edward House, American triumphalism was firmly entrenched. It was an article of faith that led to wars. Some were small, like the guerilla insurrection which broke out in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. Others were titanic, like the Second World War and its precursor, the Great War of 1914-18.
Second, the entire body politic of America--not just “the elites” in Washington, but “the man in the street”--came to believe that the United States had somehow acquired the right, indeed the duty, to intervene in matters that were legitimately none of America’s business.
It was a presumption which amounted to hubris across the board. There is no such right, duty or obligation. Ezra Pound stated in 1927: “The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius; it consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other peoples’ affairs.” Pound was correct, and so was Confucius. But hubris is still with us, big time. Indeed, it remains the sine qua non of American foreign policy.
No matter how unwise, deluded and suborned the politicians in Washington might be, no matter how powerful its various war lobbies and special interest groups might become, America could not have arrived at the point of being where it is today--an overextended and perhaps near bankrupt empire--unless the above two premises were in place and in play.
On February 15th, 2007 an important article appeared in The New York Review of Books by foreign policy scholar William Pfaff. It was entitled “America’s Manifest Destiny” and explicates some of the above ideas in great detail. Pfaff argues for a more reasonable and a less grandiose approach to American foreign policy; he argues against the interventionist and triumphalist mode which has proven to be so counter-productive, if not actually self-destructive. Such heresy has routinely been denounced as “isolationism” for the past 70+ years, but it is nothing more than common sense.
The most thought-provoking sentence in Pfaff’s long article could be his rhetorical question: “What is the threat that America keeps at bay?” The short answer is that most of the presumed threats are illusory. More to the point, they were created by Washington to advance a private agenda, often quite brazenly. This is becoming clear as mud today, but it has been the case since 1917. The train wreck in the Middle East, which accelerated out of control after 9/11, should force at least some literate Americans to reevaluate their history and ask themselves the simple question, “How did we get here?” How, indeed?
For starters, take the Cold War. It was a response to the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union, its surrogates and satellites. But the Soviet Union as a “Superpower” entity was itself the creation of American interventionism. The cause of Soviet communism was hugely advanced when Washington, in the person of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, intervened in the internal affairs of Europe in the late 1930’s. This meddling by Washington culminated in a fratricidal war on the continent of Europe, which ended with Stalin and the Red Army in full control of half of it.
Please note that the Second World War began as a European war in September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, the upshot from a long-standing, unresolved border dispute between Germany and Poland. This dispute was due to the bizarre circumstance of the German port city of Danzig on the Baltic Sea having been detached from Germany by the Versailles “peace” treaty of 1919. Danzig was left surrounded by Polish territory of the newly-resurrected Polish state.
The new Polish republic was itself a creation of English, French, and American diplomats at Versailles. Without a doubt, the disagreement with respect to the northeastern border of Germany could have been resolved peacefully by the two parties concerned through negotiations, had it not been for the outside interference of London and Washington.
That interference directly led to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939, signed in Moscow, in which Germany and Russia sought to regain territory they both had lost to the Poles in the Great War. The conflict continued on Polish territory, which served as a battle ground in a gruesome struggle between Germany and Russia, and resulted in the German military occupation of all of Poland. It ended in 1945 with the outright annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union, and with the submergence of the rest of Poland behind the Iron Curtain for more than forty years.
To a remarkable degree, still unappreciated to this day, the war in Europe which commenced in 1939 was promoted behind the scenes by the Roosevelt Administration, using London as its cat’s-paw. The first and perhaps greatest victim was Poland. The sequence of events is as follows. At Washington’s instigation, London and Paris declared war against Germany, but not Russia.
Then, after declaring war, London and Paris did absolutely nothing to assist Poland as she found herself invaded on two sides--from the west by Germany and from the east by Russia. These realities set in motion a chain reaction that the White House realized it could not control from the sidelines. It obliged Roosevelt, a few years later, to railroad an “isolationist” America into the war in Europe, using the ruse of the “surprise” Japanese attack in December, 1941 on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Roosevelt’s treachery at Pearl Harbor was followed by his military crusade on the European continent, which resulted in, among other things, the carpet bombing of Germany into rubble, the immiserization of Italy and, in general, the wholesale wrecking of Europe as an independent entity. Then came the crowning achievement, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorized by Harry Truman, which events killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in a flash, a war crime for the ages.
True, Roosevelt’s intervention in Europe and Asia did, as intended, provide a winning formula to terminate the Great Depression and to divert attention away from the failure of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda. However, in the aftermath it left all of Europe starving, in ruins, and occupied by extra-territorial forces. Moreover, England was broke and reduced to a nullity, the once great British Empire was kaput, the Empire of Japan was smashed, the Red Chinese were in power, the Korean communists in the ascendency, and Stalin had conquered half of Europe, with his agents actively subverting the other half.
Such were some of the more obvious benefits of Washington’s triumphalism up to that time for the people on the ground and on the receiving-end.
Bear in mind, as well, that the Second World War was preordained by the defeat of the Central Powers in the Great War of 1914-18. The collapse of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918 was the direct result of Washington, in the person of Woodrow Wilson, arriving at the eleventh hour to rescue the leaders of the British Empire who had miscalculated and gotten in over their heads, and who had already lost their war against the Kaiser on the Western Front in France.
John Bull had finally met his match. The Great War and the vindictive Versailles peace treaty of 1919 not only made the Second World War inevitable, but also created the Soviet Union and launched the career of Adolf Hitler.
Twenty years later, the secret diplomacy of another U.S. President, FDR, would propel Moscow into the very heart of Europe and lay the groundwork for the Cold War.
This latter enterprise was a belated attempt by Washington to prevent Moscow and the Red Army from ingesting the rest of Europe. It succeeded when the Soviet Union and the fraud known as “communism” finally imploded in 1989 due to the weight of internal contradictions, thereby leaving Washington on stage as the world’s “lone surviving Superpower.”
In brief, the bloodstained track record of U.S. foreign policy since 1898 has been an amazing saga of buttinskyism degenerating into bullying on a grand scale, all masquerading as altruism. The record has been remarkably consistent. [Perhaps the only notable exception was when the U.S. Senate, led by Harvard historian Henry Cabot Lodge, defied Wilson and refused to ratify the Versailles treaty and declined U.S. membership in the League of Nations.]
Like the present impossible fiasco in Iraq, presided over by Cheney and Bush, both world wars of the 20th Century were “of choice”, entered into by determined hypocrites and prevaricators operating out of the White House. Sad to say, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is not unique or unprecedented.
It is part of a pattern. Except for Soviet ICBM’s during Cold War, America was not a target and has not been in actual danger from any of the countries which Washington has chosen to invade, overrun, or bomb to smithereens. Prior to September 11th, 2001, continental America had not come under attack since British redcoats occupied Washington in 1814, and burned its public buildings to the ground.
The average American, on whose behalf (presumably) and in whose name all this aggressive adventurism was undertaken, has been bamboozled and utilized as cannon fodder by the powers-that-be. Today, a moderate form of mass hysteria reigns.
We have been advised or propagandized that America must now confront an Islamic terrorist threat, and we should be prepared to engage in a protracted “clash of civilizations” otherwise known as the “fight against terrorism”.
This conflict with Islam magically appeared on the radar screen very soon after the collapse of Communism, which brought the curtain down on the Cold War. Gore Vidal’s wry, off-the-cuff comment--”It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a coincidence”--is most appropriate, if not spot on.
The new threat has been wildly exaggerated and, to a certain extent, fabricated. The jihadist danger was entirely avoidable, including the atrocities of 9/11. That is what makes it all so maddening. Indeed, whatever threat does exist was brought into being by Washington’s own counter-productive activities. To cite the most obvious example, in our post 9/11 world, al-Qaeda and terrorism in Iraq did not exist until Cheney and Bush invaded and occupied Iraq.
Do you recall the Christian foreign minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, explaining in the run-up to “Operation Iraqi Freedom” that Baghdad did not even have diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was sheltering Osama bin Laden?
But now, with a straight face, Bush proclaims that the terrorism, which his own invasion of Iraq created, must be defeated at any price, no matter how long it takes—or America will be placed in mortal danger.
This is insufferable, ridiculous and embarrassing. By far, the actual danger to America and Europe is from “blowback”—the unforeseen, unintended but inevitable consequences of bizarre foreign policy initiatives executed by Washington’s crackbrained politicians of both parties. Due to laziness and misinformation, such policies have remained unknown to the vast majority of the American people, who at this point are understandably bewildered and confused. Is it any wonder?
Have you thought about what motivated the Arab terrorists who attacked New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11th, 2001?
It must have been something. It may well have been, as Middle East expert Robert Fisk pointed out the following day, a set of circumstances impacting the Middle East which profoundly affected and disturbed them, and which ultimately drove them insane.
We were informed by the White House in the immediate aftermath of the attacks that it had something to do with the terrorists’ hatred of our freedom and democracy.
But that glib explanation was designed to divert attention away from the true significance of what had happened. It showed no appreciation for the destructive forces unleashed thanks to decades of U.S. foreign policy arrogance, neglect and malfeasance in the Middle East.
There is a common thread woven through the Great War, the Second World War, and now the multiple battlegrounds in the Middle East. The European bloodbath of the Great War, known as World War I, ended with the defeat of the Central Powers. This unlikely outcome destroyed the Ottoman Empire and gifted the world with Communism for Russia, Zionism for Palestine, and a land grab by the British Empire throughout the Middle East and beyond. How is that for a dose of freedom and democracy?
The entry of Woodrow Wilson, late into the conflict on the side of England in 1917, was an impressive accomplishment. It marked a decisive turning point, for which the honorable gentlemen in Whitehall—Lloyd George, Sir Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill—felt compelled to reward, as a quid pro quo, a kind of gratuity, Palestine to the Zionists, notwithstanding that this transfer would represent a blatant betrayal of the Arabs who had fought alongside the British and against the Turks, and notwithstanding that it violated the most basic human and political rights of the indigenes, the people already there, to wit, the Palestinians, both Muslims and Christians, in the Holy Land.
Albion perfidy; I am referring here to the long forgotten Balfour Declaration, the final draft of which was composed in Washington during the summer of 1917, before being passed back to London for a signature by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour in November of that year. This cryptic document consisting of three short paragraphs, and its subsequent implementation by London starting in 1920 under the leadership of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, provided the legal framework for a massive confidence trick on the back porch of Europe, which continues to this day. It is the root of our present difficulties.
The rest, to coin a phrase, is history. There is an unbroken connection between the Great War, America’s unnecessary participation in it, and everything which has transpired since then all over the Middle East. It is a continuum. In Iraq, Lebanon and in Palestine, we are witnessing today the third chapter, in effect, of the European war begun in 1914—a war which destroyed Old Europe and which may, in the end, destroy America.
International power politics at a critical juncture in the annals of the British Empire have combined with an incendiary U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, based on American domestic politics, to turn the world upside down.
We live in that world. America was sidetracked in 1898, and soon thereafter hijacked by its own unscrupulous, vainglorious politicians, just like England before it. At present, the capitol city of the new empire is carrying out a policy of disruption, war and manipulation in the Middle East to advance the same hidden agenda, just as London did after the Great War.
This is the central reality of our time, a reality which is increasingly difficult to deny or ignore, because it has become so apparent and brazen.
One fact should also be clear: this project did not start the day before yesterday with Dick Cheney, G.W. Bush and with their accomplices, those agents provocateurs known as “the neocons”.
These latter have only perfected a pre-existing scheme and taken it to a new level, employing the diversionary cover story they invented, to wit, “the clash of civilizations.” From one empire to the next. We cannot go back to the dream.
Patrick Foy is author of The Unauthorized World Situation Report.
An excellent piece; after reading it I ask myself, is there any hope for our republic to be awakened from this nightmare? Unfortunately Americans do not give a flipping damn in the majority.
Posted by samuel burke on Jun 12, 2007.
"The truth is, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. It is long gone, and nobody is particularly concerned.”
If that is a factually accurate statement, then the only legal stance to take is that the original governing structure of these United States springs back into legality. The Articles of Confederation, established in 1781, was shoved aside in 1789 when a sufficient number of states ratified the new Constitution. Ten different presidents served under the Articles of Confederation.
Far from being a badly designed scheme of government, the Articles served as the structure to give order and coherence to the Revolutionary War even before ratification of sufficient states to bring the articles into legal existence in 1781. Its crowning glories were the defeat of monarchical governance in the person of George III and the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance.
Apparently the Congress of the Confederation met for what turned out to be a final meeting on October 10, 1788, but never adjourned sine die as it would have were it to have intended to disappear into history.
In any case, a fallback structure exists that could provide a federal structure if a need arose.
[For the know-nothings, the Articles of Confederation was not the government of the Confederate States of America.]
Posted by Donald on Jun 12, 2007.
I’d like to add to or say something profound about Patrick Foy on The Death of the American Empire but I can only say thanks for the history lesson.
Posted by TFG on Jun 12, 2007.
The amusing part is that most Americans don’t realise the American Empire is dying. They are to busy with tv sports, porn, working at Wal Mart, and other diversions to take notice. They behave as if the US were still top dog. All the while, ther US is being invaded at home and being humiliated abroad. If and when Ameicans finally wake up, I sincerely hope they will take action against those responsible: the traitors and subversives in Washington DC, corporate headquarters, and the media outlets.
Posted by Trevor on Jun 12, 2007.
How many men in 100 understand this vs. the History Channel version of the last 100 years? How many are willing to endure the psychic scarring that occurs when you realize you were raised on lies? How many are willing to try and wrestle the steering wheel back from THEM?
The answer is not enough. This train must wreck and until then, worse is better, worse is better.
Posted by neeechee on Jun 12, 2007.
"The new threat has been wildly exaggerated and, to a certain extent, fabricated. The jihadist danger was entirely avoidable, including the atrocities of 9/11.”
Just how avoidable, and more importantly, just how fabricated, is becoming all too clear:
http://www.st911.org/
Posted by B.R. Merrick on Jun 12, 2007.
American involvement in the affairs of Europe at the beginning of the 20th century was inevitable. The decline of the power of the British Empire and the rise of Germany meant America would be faced with a hostile Europe under German rule in the twentieth century. America could not rely on the British Navy to protect Western interests and had to assume Britain’s responsiblities in the world.
Posted by Joe on Jun 12, 2007.
The Constitution has been severely wounded, but the fascination with Rep. Dr. Ron Paul shows that there’s still hope & that the effort to force the Federal Government back to within its Constitutional Bounds is worthwhile.
Posted by Rich Beecher on Jun 12, 2007.
Perhaps Mr. Foy is right that WWII resulted from an arrogant, misguided foreign policy on the part of the United States. Alternately, it could have occurred because a genocidal, nihilistic, megalomanic happened to get control of the greatest military force in the world.
I think I’ll go ask a few of the many WWII combat vets. I know which interpretation they favor. Oh, that’s right, they’re all misguided dupes like the rest of us.
Posted by B Henry on Jun 12, 2007.
Mr. Foy wrote: “Then came the crowning achievement, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorized by Harry Truman, which events killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in a flash, a war crime for the ages.” Would Mr. Foy and friends have had American soldiers, marines and sailors die so that he could sleep soundly? The purpose of war is to terrorize the enemy into submission.
Being shot at is not the most pleasant of sensibilities. Japan, not Germany, killed the most during World War II. Just ask any Chinese. I have never met one who had great sympathy for Japanese. Americans have contrived to forget we were the great suppliers of the Japanese war machine before Pearl Harbor.
In 1995 when Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama visited Peking he was met by an accusation in the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese government, that 35 million Chinese died due to brutality of the Japanese. Within days the New York Times had an article written by their Tokyo correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner which credited only 10 million Chinese dying due to Japanese depredations. Who would want to quibble over 25 million dead Chinese?
It must be noted this number was over four times the number of Jews killed by the Nazis and occurred in the period remembered by Jews as the Holocaust to the exclusion of other people dying and by most of the rest of the world as World War II. The Chinese have never forgotten this, and one must assume one day they will make sure the rest of the world, most particularly the United States, does not either.
Forgotten by most Americans has been the Russian entry into the war against Japan. When counting the dead Mr. Foy should make allowances that the Japanese attribute more dead from Russian captivity than both atomic bombs.
Americans should only apologize and cringe so much.
Posted by Richard Earley on Jun 12, 2007.
Great piece of historical analysis. Thanks.
Posted by Jerry C. Meng on Jun 12, 2007.
Wow, it’s really embarassing to hear so many grown free men admitting defeat. Not me brothers, not me. I’m as free as a bird and the Federal government can kiss my lilly white butt. Yes, I’m caged, but it’s my SWORN duty to escape.
Ron Paul for President!
Will Blalock Brazoria, Texas Ron Paul’s Fighting 14th District
Posted by Will Blalock on Jun 12, 2007.
And here I thought the purpose of war was to defend youself against unjust aggressors. silly me.
Posted by c matt on Jun 12, 2007.
Mr. Foy is on target, but not on the bullseye. The Spanish-American War was blueprinted in “American Interest in Seapower” by A. T. Mahan in 1897, except that Mahan was tactful enough not to suggest taking the Philippines from Spain. William Jennings Bryan’s finest hour came when he resigned as Wilson’s Secretary of State because Wilson’s brand of neutralism between the Allies and Central Powers was guaranteed to bring us into the war on the British side, and Bryan, a Christian pacifist, wanted no part of it.
There is some speculation that Wilson truly believed that God intended the Anglo-Saxon race to rule the world in the name of Jesus Christ. Whether Germany would have won had the US sat it out is an interesting question. Had the two sides negotiated a mutually tolerable peace, Adolf Hitler might have had a successful career doing watercolors of ancient buildings.
The US having interfered and helped dictate the Treaty of Versailles, WWII was inevitable. Hitler and Stalin’s divvying up of Poland was essentially restoring that part of the map to what it had been before the Paris Peace Conference. Roosevelt II certainly wanted America’s strength to facilitate an Anglo-Soviet victory, but he was far too much of a ship-lover to have sat back and let the Pacific Fleet get skunked the way it did.
All we needed to be at war with Japan was to be attacked, not skunked.
Also there was no guarantee that war with Japan necessarily meant war with Germany and Italy. Pearl Harbor, December 7. Declaration of war with Japan, December 8. There was no war with Germany until Hitler declared war on the US on December 11 and the US responded on December 12.
If Hitler had had the canny forbearance to sit back while the America Firsters ended lend-least to Churchill and Stalin so that the US could concentrate on Japan, he just might have won. Had Roosevelt known what Admiral Yamamoto was up to, he was astute enough to imagine this and act accordingly. Sorry, try again.
As for Truman’s failure to accept Churchill’s advice about how to deal with Stalin and his allowing a serious cold war to get started unnecessarily, rather than keeping things down to a brass-knuckles game of chess, the less said the better.
What’s really dismaying is that the US, having become the world’s only (military) superpower, has taken up all the ghastly practices the “Readers’ Digest” used to excoriate the USSR and Red China for when I was a kid. And it’s all a self-destructive mistake. Karl Rove is a big fan of McKinley and his administration.
The neoconservative (neoimperialist) mistake is to think that they can do it all over again. Their fatal fallacy is in failing to acknowledge that, in 1898, the US was on the way up. We’ve been on the way down since VJ Day, but nobody wants to admit it and rethink things accordingly.
Posted by Reg Stocking on Jun 12, 2007.
This is an excellent overview. Rather than America and the Anglosphere being the ‘good guys’ they have been led by Elites who use their peoples as cannon fodder and tax slaves to wage wars, physical and cultural, first and foremost to weaken and humiliate, if not necessarily destroy, all nations that could, might could we would emphasize in the hill South, revive its part of historic, pre-Modern Christendom.
America, taking over for the British Empire, is serving the role as imperial giant to replace the vestiges of Western Christian Civilization with centralized, multicultural secularism held together by military force and bread and circuses.
Posted by James Cantrell on Jun 12, 2007.
It fascinates me how nearly everyone has his own inviolable interpretation of history. Everyone is a sort of revisionist, yet no one wants his interpretation revised. Maybe Henry Ford was right when he said that history is mostly bunk. Change a critical fact or two in any construction of history and the whole edifice comes tumbling down.
For my own money, George Washington gave the best advice when he counseled us to eschew entangling alliances (mind our own business). That was our Founding Father’s parsimonious political model for foreign affairs. But that’s no fun, is it?
Posted by Mr. FoSquare on Jun 12, 2007.
Mr. Fo Square’s citation of the functionally illiterate Henry Ford does hit the edge of the target. History is too much fun to be mostly bunk, though many interpretations do have a high buncombe content. Reading various accounts, including ones with which one instinctively disagrees, and deciding for oneself is the best way to go about it.
Washington’s rejection of entangling alliances was commonsense enlightenment when the United States was [not were] materially self- sufficient, militarily weak, and enjoyed thousands of miles’ worth of saltwater insulation with no Atlantic cables to disturb our domestic tranquillity. Sad to say, things have changed since then. What the answer is I don’t know, but it’s easy to identify things which aren’t. Such as so-called neoconservatism.
Posted by Reg Stocking on Jun 12, 2007.
Our entangled relationship with Israel by itself has constituted a catastrophic foreign policy. This relationship isn’t driven by economic inter-dependency, the “shrinking globe,” military needs, or by any other reasonable explanation. It’s driven by the pervasive influence of Jewish Power throughout our vital institutions.
The so-called neo-conservatives (Zionist penetration of the Republican Party) are just a more recent manifestation of that insidious virus, and only one dimension of it. Yes, the world is a more complicated place today. But Washington’s cautionary advice applies as well today as a starting point for foreign policy as it did in his time.
Posted by Mr. FoSquare on Jun 13, 2007.
It is true, as Mr. FoSquare says, that America’s entanglement with Israel has constituted a catastrophic foreign policy. But as that did not occur until 1948 and the catastrophies began much earlier, focusing on Israel is to highlight a symptom rather than the cause.
The great cause is that once the Yankees won The War and made Anglo-Saxopn Puritan culture America’s mandarin culture, the reconstituted singular USA was bound to become a self-righteous empire that would promote Jewish interest because ideas have consequences, they move toward inherent and sometimes unavoidable ends. As A-S Puritanism was the quintessential late Reformatiion era hardcore Judaizing heresy, it is a given that any culture it rules, it directs, will become very much like the USA of the past century and more.
Oliver Cromwell and Benjamin Disraeli and Abe Lincoln and British Empire worshiping Woodrow Wilson lead almost ineluctably to today’s Neocons and the final transformation of America into a centralized ‘democratic’ empire mandating worldwide abortion, homosexual promotion, religious syncretism and indifferentism, and philosophical relativism ruled by Anglophonic Elite might makes right judgment.
Posted by James Cantrell on Jun 14, 2007.
Mr. Foy,
I linked here from Antiwar. What an excellent overview. Personally, I found Stennett’s “Day of Deceit’ and various reports on how America was seduced/dragged into WW I real eye-openers in understanding the degree to which US foreign policy - along with that of many other nations - has been so nakedly driven by interests far removed from those of the citizenry involved.
Most of the stories we grew up on in which most Germans were monsters, and now most Islamists are fascists, were and are hogwash. It takes quite a bit of hard work, not to mention a certain amount of courage, to be able to penetrate the fog of mass deception in which we all blunder along. Again, this is an excellent overview.
PS. One link I have on WW I is this, for those who are interested. The paragraph which includes ‘March 5’ (to search for) is particularly interesting in revealing how the creation of the Zionist state was central to getting the US involved in WWI, something which to this day is largely unknown, and certainly not ‘kosher’ cocktail party fare! http://www.hypocrisy.biz/Balfour.html
I don’t know anything about the website as a whole; this link came about from a search for connections between Zionists and the Balfour agreement and US involvement in WW I about which I had read earlier and elsewhere but not saved.
Posted by Ashley Howes on Jun 14, 2007.
Very Interesting! Glad to hear someone talk sense. Islam does not condone violence but it does talk about fighting back and dignity. Islam is misunderstood on two fronts firstly by the idiots who purport to be representatives of Islam and the secondly by the Western governments who fear Islam (and rightly so). Jihad is the usual point of discussion, of which, sadly I have seen very few people talk sense.
I see a change in America, a land itself occupied, whose inhabitants were killed to make way for people yelling ‘new world’ when the world was not new at all. A history tainted and written in the blood of others, cannot bring peace to others. Islam will and is rising in America. Peace will prevail then. For those who are upset with the brief description of a few aspects of Islam, I suggest you read the Quran before you comment.
Posted by Faheem Sardar on Jun 14, 2007.
The “Death of the American Empire” is simply the best, concise, short history of America and of our horrific impact on the world stage and on what we have lost as a nation since Lincoln’s War, that I have ever read in my 57 years.
Nothing can compare to this article in terms on enlightenment, or sadness at the well hidden history and failure of the greatest experiment in self-government and liberty in world history.
For those of us who seek truth, love history and who bear the burden of living in a nation where false history, propaganda and unrighteous self-delusion surround everything we read and observe involving politics, the news and current events, Patrick Foy provides us a brief moment of sanity and sincere honesty about what we really have become.
The first step on the road to recovery from a tragedy whether a serious addiction, the loss of a loved one or the sobering realization that we have made a tragic mistake with terrible consequences is to see ourselves and our actions as they really are. I can’t quarrel with a single point in the article or the conclusions.
It is time that we as Americans, take stock of our true situation, spread the word about where we are and how we got here hopefully in time to preserve our wealth and begin to restore our liberties so we can survive as a people as the empire crashes down around us.
I’ve found that when you realize that you’ve taken the wrong road, the best action is often to backtrack to the last sure landmark that you can remember. It is the same for our nation and I believe we should go back to our original limited government, the Articles of Confederation as established by our Patriot Founding Fathers.
I will today, forward this article and URL to the thousands of people on the e-mail lists from my websites and I urge you to do the same to all of your friends who love liberty and seek to understand our real history and restore the failed legacy of our Founding Fathers. In addition, I’ll add a link to it in my new online book, “The Swiss Preserve Solution” a new politically incorrect guide to defending your wealth & liberty from attack during the latter-days of the American Empire. More info on the free book can be found at http://www.swissconfederationinstitute.org
Ron Holland President of The Swiss Confederation Institute and marketing coordinator for FreedomFest.
Posted by Ron Holland on Jun 14, 2007.
Brilliant writing. Yes, there’s a common thread. Zionism. Zionists bludgeoned Wilson into restarting WWI to: 1. acquire Palestine, and; 2. smash the Kaiser. Sadly, all the rest follows from that Jewish pressure applied to Woodrow Wilson. Balfour, Versailles, WWII, the postwar breakdown of traditional White border controls, the non-White invasions in all White lands, Neocon control of Washington, and now Iraq. A war devised and
run by Likudniks.
Yes, it’s time for a revolution. Ron Paul can be part of that revolution.
Posted by Jamie Kelso on Jun 14, 2007.
No Arabs did 911 on America. If the author could not see this,then I question any of his history remarks. Hitler’s Germany was also funded by USA and not one word why Germany attacked Russia-Twice. And who are we grooming today to attack Russia? EU !Sad part is the Zionist hating the Russians and we die for them .
Posted by JoJo on Jun 14, 2007.
This article is very objective and near to truth from a westener. This world history and if you go through Koran then the fate history fate of most of the rulers when they were arrogant and were not stoped the world had to suffer the same the same case is with America. They have lost the credibility to lead the world. We Muslim are direct sufferer of American Hegamony. History repeats as the American destroyed Pearl harbor and attacked Japan, the same idea happened with Muslims
Posted by Ghouri on Jun 14, 2007.
Arab terrprist attacked on 911??? Evidence please. Sheesh, what nonsense! At least seven of the accused are still alive. There are no airport videos. Names do not appear on passenger lists. What garbage.
Posted by Ralph on Jun 14, 2007.
Mr. Foy does not give nearly enough credit to the Zionists for our involvement in the destruction of the Mid East. Zionists pushed for the destruction of Iraq, are aiding a civil war in what is left of Palestine, trying for another in Lebanon and are howling for nuclear destruction of Iran. All of this destructive evil just to to “legitimatize” the theft of land. America’s insane participation in this crime will someday be so clear to anyone shifting through the ashes of a ruined empire.
Posted by richard vajs on Jun 14, 2007.
I find it amazing that an arrogant mental runt like George Bush, could so easily and quickly destroy, what was once the greatest nation on earth. Certainly, Dick Cheney gets much credit. We have nothing left to go with, credibility, gold or silver, constitution, congressional oversight, justice, nothing; except nuclear weapons and delivery systems. I suppose we use those weapons and then the end. Ron Pollan
Posted by Ron Pollan on Jun 14, 2007.
The article does show America drifting into destruction by violating its own Constitution by greedy, power hungary politicians, and now by Corporate Greed, displacing USA workers for foreigners. The displacing of American workers is treason by Corporate America.
Posted by John Calvin on Jun 14, 2007.
People of faith believe in their inherent power to change their surroundings. When enough people within the United States begin to believe that we can and must remove the current leadership and restructure our government it will happen. Until then, we will not be swayed by intelligent “ringers” planted for the specific purpose to destroy the hope and efforts of the faithful. The sheep are awakening!
Posted by Charlotte Smith on Jun 14, 2007.
The American Empire is dead. Chimpy and Cheney killed it.
Posted by Tom3 on Jun 14, 2007.
Excellent material, all. Reminds one never to believe deeply in anything, since when confronted with conflicting facts the mind goes into cognitive dissonance which is an impossible state of mind.
For my part, I look to Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope” for a fairly accurate expose of modern history. The villans are ll lined up and their intent soundly defined. Carroll, though, saw no problem in a world run by the few, as did Plato before him. Me and mine, however, are preparing the Walters Compound for meaner times ahead, and are as anxious as children on Christmas eve.
“Good luck and good hunting” might be an appropriate quote these days.
Posted by Tom Walters on Jun 14, 2007.
Nothing new here, just some history lessons and spin and italicized foreign words (including some that don’t need to be italicized; they have already been assimilated).
No abstract thoughts in this this article.
For a more thoughtful approach, I would suggest referring to the work of Morris Berman ("The Twilight of American Culture” or Stewart Ewen.)
This is not our century. We are 5 percent of the world’s population, and that will be reflected in world economics and politics. We have, as the author noted, lost our way, but we had a pretty decent life as late as the Fifties or Sixties.
Capitalism was refuted by experience in the Thirties. We never would have escaped from the Great Depression had it not been for World War II, no matter who started it.
Thompson is right. Look for a new way, just as the Declaration of Independence says you should. Happy Independence Day.
Posted by Clayton Hallmark on Jun 14, 2007.
Big gap in your knowledge of history, sir. The Jacobin revolution of 1861 saw our States invaded, cities burned to the ground, and civilians starved and murdered on a scale much larger than in 1814. That was the end of the Republic and the shredding of the Constitution. You can look the other way if you want, but that won’t make it go away.
Posted by Elizabeth Del Greco on Jun 14, 2007.
A wonderfully, well-written analysis of history and the state of affairs we have today. Sadly, far too few Americans have the intellectual honesty or curiousity to consider this story. May that start to change.
Posted by JR Bowman on Jun 14, 2007.
I’ve some minor quibbles with Mr. Foy’s argument about American responsibility for both world wars (there’s no denying that Austro-Hungarian imperialism ignited the first, nor that Hitler sought to achieve his goals through war as well), but the main point of the article is factually accurate: the United State has been an empire for over a century, thanks to the messianic Yankee Puritanism that triumphed in 1865 (see Acton’s letter to Lee about the cause lost at Appomatox to understand this fully). The question now is whether it can recover from it (assuming there’s any will to do so) and how. When it comes to that, I’m a pessimist.
Posted by Nebojsa Malic on Jun 14, 2007.
Wow! Every now and then one comes across a corner of the internet where clarity reigns. Both the article and the excellent comments about it give me hope in this time of deep, deep darkness. It is heartening to see that not everyone thinks that history started in 1945. Kudos to all!
Posted by Empire of Idiots on Jun 14, 2007.
This was a brilliant piece. But James Cantrell should be writing his own pieces! He is a genius.
For example he wrote ...
America, taking over for the British Empire, is serving the role as imperial giant to replace the vestiges of Western Christian Civilization with centralized, multicultural secularism held together by military force and bread and circuses.
Oliver Cromwell and Benjamin Disraeli and Abe Lincoln and British Empire worshiping Woodrow Wilson lead almost ineluctably to today’s Neocons and the final transformation of America into a centralized ‘democratic’ empire mandating worldwide abortion, homosexual promotion, religious syncretism and indifferentism, and philosophical relativism ruled by Anglophonic Elite might makes right judgment.
Posted by Anthony C. LoBaido on Jun 14, 2007.
Rather, Manifest Insanity. “The World Turned Upside Down”, indeed!
Posted by Vic Anderson on Jun 14, 2007.
Great piece, Mr. Foy, and accurate. To those above who complain that it’s only Mr. Foy’s version of history, I draw your attention to these three disparate pieces.
If you have access to the LA Times Archives or Lexis-Nexis: “Commentary; A Serious Case of Mistaken Identity; The U.S. is not the ‘indispensable nation,’ as a growing WWII mythology would suggest”; BENJAMIN SCHWARZ. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Jun 22, 2000. pg. 11. Schwarz was the Literary Editor for the Atlantic Monthly at the time.
The second is “Equality, not Zionism, Will Save Israel” by Anthony Loewenstein on Tony Karon’s excellent blog. Karon is the Senior Editor for Time Magazine, a South African, Jewish, and lived on a kibbutz in his youth: http://tonykaron.com/2007/06/11/loewenstein-equality-not-zionism-will-save-israel/
The third is far more controversial for its content: Benjamin H. Freedman’s 1961 speech at the Willard Hotel in D.C. Freedman was a successful NYC Jewish businessman who broke with Judaism in 1945, and changed his last name to represent how he felt.
One of the last interviewers to talk to him before his death discovered that Freedman’s father was a co-founder of the American Jewish Committee in 1906. Freedman was present at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with Bernard Baruch when they were carving up Germany. His speech describes what led up to it and what happened afterward, The link: http://www.themodernreligion.com/jihad/freedman.html. If you search online for Benjamin H. Freedman, you can find a recording of it.
Posted by John Silver on Jun 14, 2007.
Brilliant article. The real culprit in all this is your Constitution. It can be interpreted to mean ANYTHING by an unprincipled, crafty lawyer and you have a wealth (no pun intended) of those in America.
Posted by peter on Jun 14, 2007.
The USSR was never a threat to the United States. On the contrary, WE were a threat to THEM. Their nuclear weapons were acquired to deter any US nuclear attacks on Soviet soil. (Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki--there was a precedent.) Horrible as the Soviet experiment was, their foreign policy was essentially defensive and highly cautious.
And their invasion of Europe was a result of the bloodletting that cost them 20 million lives. Incidentally, Hungary and Rumania were Axis countries that participated in the German invasion of Russia.
This, of course, goes against all US orthodoxies, whether liberal, conservative, or libertarian.
Posted by Gene H. Bell-Villada on Jun 14, 2007.
How did we get from there and then to now? First off, the south could not have been allowed to survive as a slave state. Secondly, to suggest that Hitler would have been satiffied with Poland is ridiculous. Thirdly to suggest that the present insanity can be laid at the feet of the fact that government of, by and for the people is somehow obsolete is to deny the last great hope for humanity. I will leave you with a line from my son’s first play “Wine To Blood” in which Sean O’Leary says, ‘I don’t konow if there is a Utopia, but I am certain that we must act as though there can be”.
Posted by Hal O'Leary on Jun 14, 2007.
Fascinating summary which I mostly agree with, except – WWII. You don’t seem to attribute any homicidal malice or danger from Adolf Hitler, and I don’t think the world would benefit from his having conquered western Europe and England. I don’t think that would have been nice or beneficial at all. And the loss of even more Jews would have seriously deprived us culturally, intellectually, scientifically, etc., not to mention the poor example set by the death camps. That really had to be interfered with.
Otherwise, I agree that we absolutely should let the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, take care of its own business, while maintaining human intellligence to monitor events that could affect the U.S. Bring home all soldiers, weapons, equipment from South America, Europe, Korea, Middle East. We can be sure the oil will always find its way to the market.
Posted by Mary Garber on Jun 15, 2007.
’Death of American Empire’ by Patrick Foy is an outstanding article eloquently but neatly summarising reality.
The only element I personally would like him to have included would be a reference to ‘Ozymandias’ - Percy Bysshe Shelley’s inestimable comment on the inevitability of nemesis following hubris:
‘My Name is Ozymandias King of kings look on my works ye mighty and despair’
The ‘traveller in an Antique Land’ may well have been traversing Mesopotamia [The land between between two rivers]- or modern day Iraq - while the concluding desolation of the last few lines.
‘Nothing beside remains. Around the base of that colossal wreck the lone and level sands stretch far away’ well pressages the outcome and the end game for the insane delusions of US foreign policy.
It is further noteworthy that throughout history the end of empire tends always to be immediately preceeded by severe economic pressure brought about by grandiose overstretch - combined in the last throes with the feverish sabre rattling of terminal decline and ultimate collapse.
Posted by RJ on Jun 15, 2007.
Now we know why Southerners fought so valiantly in the War to Prevent Southern Independence. Lincoln was admired by Karl Marx and openly said so. Mr. Foy would enhance his position more by including more on the War of northern Agression and the similarities that exist today between W the Emperor and Abe I.
Also lost on all of this is the massacre and genocide of Native Americans after the end of the CSA.
Much of the terrorist tactics against Indians were lead by Sherman, who had perfected them against innocent civilians in the South.We can now see the nation’s propoganda machine in rewriting the true history of our country in today’s vilification of anything southern including her culture and symbols mainly ,the battle flag which is the only true American flag.. The other S$S one represents empire.
How can we make Mr. Foy’s work more widespread to wake the rest of us up? I see this as a daunting task in the face of what Jimmy Carter called a malaisse. Godspeed Mr. Foy!
Posted by Ronnie Abrams on Jun 16, 2007.
Brilliant insights,I would suggest Patrick Foy might have stepped back further in US history that would reveal an impulse of the Judeo-christian project ( in-group loyalty, out-group contempt) that started with the domination and subsequent genocide of the native americans. Today most of those people have disappeared without leaving a trace as to who they were and how they lived and what they thought felt or believed.
This puts the “democratic” forms of the project into context. No matter what the constitution says and who gets elected the project continues. After all the land belonged to someone else.
Once north america had been overrun the original impulse drove what Patrick Foy has described, and the quest for global domination continues.
In Palestine or Iraq, this impulse finds its current expression as enslavement is followed by ethnic cleansing. This impulse will continue until the US empire implodes much as the soviet project imploded. Lets hope this happens before the peoples of the middle east disappear like the native americans. In both cases there is only fear and loathing expressed towards the victims’ way of life and culture.
The takeover of the US by the military Industrial Zionist Allaince, combined with the complete ignorance of the general public makes any other outcome highly unlikely.
The huge danger is that the dozen or so sociopaths in AIPAC that run this country are now hell bent on instigating nuclear war and the outcome may be armaggedon.
Posted by Ali on Jun 23, 2007.
"There is an unbroken connection between the Great War, America’s unnecessary participation in it, and everything which has transpired since then all over the Middle East. It is a continuum. In Iraq, Lebanon and in Palestine, we are witnessing today the third chapter, in effect, of the European war begun in 1914”
Yeah, that’s exactly it. After the decline of the oppressive Soviet empire, much of Europe has finally returned to smaller, free states similar to those in place before 1914. I guess that marked the end of “chapter two” of the Great War.
Right about that time (1990), we then began to see more substantive shifts in the Middle East. I’m still waiting for the press to even begin to discuss what’s happening in geopolitical terms.
Beyond that, there’s been so many good books come out in recent years about Iraq and the Mid East that have been given very little attention by the U.S. press.
While we surely must blame both Republicans and Democrats in the Congress for giving Bush and the neocons a free ride on Iraq, the press continues to give them just as much of a free ride, never asking the obvious hard questions about either our goals or the historical/political context.
Posted by Gordon R. Vaughan on Jul 05, 2007.
Also by Author
Bush & Cheney: It's Time to Resign
George Tenet: Revenge of the Nerd
Investigate the Neocons
Iraq: The Web of Lies
Pulling the Trigger on Iran
Regime Change Redux
Ron Paul's Patriotic Crimethink
The Kissinger Connection
The Kissinger Pardon
Wake Me At Armageddon
IS THE CONSTITUTION OBSOLETE?
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1996/5/1996_5_12.shtml
A recent book argues that to preserve the Republic, we must stop worshiping an outmoded document
BY BERNARD A. WEISBERGER
If you write a column called “In the News” long enough, some of your subjects eventually begin to catch up with one another. This space recently (November 1995) was occupied with the past history of the struggle for the item veto, and behold, in April 1996 it ended in victory for the veto’s advocates. If the law giving Presidents the right to selectively kill individual appropriations is sustained against any Court challenge, it will mark an important constitutional change that shifts an allotment of budgetary power from Congress to the Executive. Yet it will not demand the complex process of formal amendment.
Presumably that should please Daniel Lazare, whose recent book The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy argues that the venerated eighteenth-century charter needs to be overhauled or even scrapped because it blocks the way to any modernization of American government that will give “the people” power to cope with twenty-first-century problems. Lazare sees us as complacent in the face of gridlock because of our blind faith in the Constitution.
Well! Only about a year ago [May/June 1995] another of these columns dealt with a volume by Richard B. Bernstein and Jerome Agel, Amending America, whose subtitle suggested that the adoration was only skin-deep. It was: If We Love the Constitution So Much, Why Do We Keep Trying to Change It? Plainly the two books have a very different take on how Americans really feel about the 1787 compact. Who is in the right?
If I come down on the side of Bernstein-Agel, it is not because—confession of interest—I was once a colleague of Bernstein, nor is it from a lack of sympathy with Lazare’s social-democratic orientation. But in making his case that Constitution worship embeds the feet of democracy in cement just when it needs to take giant steps, I think he has seriously misread the facts.
To begin with, he holds that the original sin was in the Constitutional Convention itself. He believes (without citing much of the record in support) that the members were bewitched by the puritanical views of an English “Country” party that automatically distrusted central government, worshiped traditional Elizabethan institutions dominated by local interests, and “feared modernization [and] progress.” So they put together a system looking back to a golden day when power was divided and traditional law was in the saddle rather than fallible majorities—a system that “rather than focusing energy ... would disperse, muffle and absorb it.”
Oh? If that was all the framers wanted, they could have left ineffectual Articles of Confederation in place. In fact their main purpose was to “focus” power in a national government strong enough to survive the jealousies of the wrangling states.
Lazare soon gets to his real indictment. The framers, who “represented the American economic and social elite,” disliked democracy but were caught in a bind: How could they maintain order and authority while giving the people power to pursue the general interest of the United States?
Their answer was to compromise. In the Preamble they gave an implied but sweeping mandate to “the People of the United States” to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, [and] promote the general Welfare”—and then they made it very hard to do those things quickly or without long arguments and more compromises.
But compromise is exactly what Lazare dislikes. He deplores the way in which the Constitution has defused disputes, “forced politicians to smooth them over, to seek common ground, to wheel and deal so that differences might be bridged.” Especially does he scorn the so-called great compromises—the waffling on slavery embodied in the rule that allowed a slave to be counted as three-fifths of a person in determining representation in the House and the creation of the Senate with equal votes for each state.
These, he says, virtually guaranteed that only a breakdown in the constitutional system could permit the eradication of slavery. But granting the anachronistic unreasonableness of the Senate—there still is no reason for Delaware to have the same two votes as Pennsylvania, not to mention California—it was that or a small-state (and slave-state) walkout and no new government at all.
By ignoring the mundane realities that shackled the convention, Lazare loads the dice and then plays with them in contrasting the peaceable abolition of slavery in Great Britain with what happened here. British abolitionists got slavery outlawed in 1833, he says, thanks to the Reform Bill of 1832, which made it “impossible to say no to a movement . . . both massive and middle class.” This ignores the political weight of the American South under any system of representation, as against that of a handful of British colonial planters with no strong parliamentary base.
It also overlooks the cultural strength of American racism; there was no “massive” or “middle class” movement to end slavery that was frustrated by the Constitution. Immediate abolitionism remained a minority view right up to 1861.
What was gaining ground was the idea of “free soil”—namely, of restricting the institution’s future expansion. The South rejected even that distant prospect, seceding when it still had thirty sure votes in the Senate (from fifteen slaveholding states out of thirty-four) to block any abolition amendment and could have maintained the barrier until there were forty-five states.
Slaveholders jumped the gun long before the genuine danger point was reached—which makes it even more certain that they would have broken up the Union even earlier in the face of an immediate threat of abolition. The Constitution simply embodied a sad political reality: Only naked power could abolish slavery while keeping the South on board.
But Lazare ignores reality when it doesn’t fit his case. Let me take another pair of examples. He holds that the 1830s were a period of “biting constitutional dictatorship ... in which Americans were prevented from acting nationally to institute internal improvements [or] create a pro-industrial economic policy.” It seems strange, therefore, that between 1830 and 1860 the nation expanded its rail network from 23 miles to 30,626 miles, increased the value of its exports from $72 million to $334 million, dredged rivers and harbors, mapped and surveyed the West, and produced enough manufactured goods to lay the foundation for what economic history rightly calls an industrial “takeoff.”
Lazare denounces the “long and tortuous” amending process, which “severely constrained” efforts to change the Constitution. But what are the facts? Once an amendment is submitted to the states, how long does it take to get the required three-fourths of them to ratify? Leave out the curious twenty-seventh (no pay raise for Congress to take effect until an election intervenes) that took from 1789 to 1992, and consider the Bill of Rights (two years and three months in an age of slow communications) as a single unit. The median time for the remaining sixteen is—can you guess?—one year.
Almost half the book is devoted to the post-1945 period, during which, Lazare insists, other democratic nations deftly modernized their political systems while we limped and tottered into our present decrepitude (apparently the flourishing fifties don’t count), dragging the anchor of the Constitution behind us. Wherein did we fail?
Well, we got a Congress increasingly ineffective because of a fragmented committee structure (not prescribed by the Constitution) and Presidents who are not so much leaders as personalities created by image makers (and what has the Constitution to do with that?). Lazare blames the Iran-contra scandal and the easy escape of the principals in it on the Constitution’s vagueness about responsibilities and punishments. That’s like blaming the banking laws for embezzlement.
Our “unraveling social fabric”? It’s partly due to “an insane jumble of conflicting [local] jurisdictions” that trip up coordinated planning to tackle interlocking problems of race, crime, poverty, deindustrialization and deurbanization. But many, if not all, of those mini-satrapies—counties, townships, school or sewage or water districts, and the like—could be combined or eliminated by the states if they so chose.
Eager to blame our failure to grapple effectively with our agonies on a presumed naive faith in our unimprovable Constitution, Lazare leaves unmentioned a few such small matters as the rise and fall of the party system (like judicial review, an interpolation not in the original Constitution); the influence of money and television in politics; the antiurban tradition generated in an agrarian past; the diverse nature of an immigrant-enriched populace; frontier individualism; the success record of free enterprise in a new and booming country.
These and many others, rather than simple-minded worship of constitutional principles, are important roots of our “paralysis.” Lazare has it backward. Culture drives politics, not the reverse. He cites Newt Gingrich to the effect that America is a “deeply conservative country” and laments that it is true “because the Ancient Constitution is a deeply conservative concept.”
On the contrary, we are a peculiar people, loving the new and the young but idealizing the past, which we constantly flee. It’s how we are, not how the Founding Fathers made us. And what the record shows is that when the will is really there, we will change the system while swearing that we are really preserving it, as we have long done.
Only by misreading that record can Lazare’s argument be sustained. I am not a constitutional fundamentalist. There are many provisions that I would willingly change. But neither do I subscribe to Lazare’s unrestrained majoritarianism, his dire warning that unless we dump present limits on the freedom of the majority to secure instant political gratification, “politics will atrophy, society will die, and civil liberties will go with it.” There are good cases for a new kind of politics, but good cases are not served by bad history.
The Constitutional Convention
http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/convention
http://www.bordc.org/resources/hess-constitution.php
The Living Constitution: Does it Work in Modern Times?
By Richard A. Hesse, Professor of Law EmeritusRemarks for the Worcester County Chapter of ACLUMOctober 29, 2005
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
So begins the document signed and proclaimed on September 17th 1788. The Constitution was a blueprint for a nation that did not yet exist. Some regarded it as a radical experiment doomed to failure. Support for it was thin at best; key states adopted it by close vote margins gained by political manipulation rather than solid agreement on concepts.
The story of the making of a nation from that blueprint is fascinating and modern historians are very good at telling it. But beyond the fascination of a good story well told is a fundamental truth. The nation has grown and prospered as no other nation has in the recorded history of the world. Among the unique features of our success is a legal and political system that imposes the rule of law on everything the government does.
Our nation, like any family that has lasted for generations, has skeletons in its closet. When one examines those embarrassing moments from our history, they frequently have a common element. The government has either ignored the rule of law or been unfaithful to the principles and values expressed in our constitution. Thus it is understandable that when the government seeks to depart from those established values and rules of law, some among us will rise up to resist and to insist that the constitutional limits on government power be enforced.
We gather tonight to honor those who have risen to speak out and to persuade fellow citizens that they must join their voice in opposition to government actions which are not faithful to the values and principles of our constitution.
Our government tells us that our country faces unparalleled threats to our national security and consequently, the constitutional safeguards to our individual liberties must be set aside. Historically, war time has generated actions by the government that would be deemed unacceptable to peace time. And we are now engaged in a “war on terror,” at least that is the claim of the national government. This combination of unparalleled threat and “war on terror” has produced a climate for permanent changes to the constitutional relationship between the government and those whom it governs.
Laws are now proposed and passed which challenge the traditional notions of constitutional protection against invasion of privacy and unreasonable search and seizure. Further, the notions of constitutional due process guaranteeing a speedy and fair trial are being sharply modified to facilitate government convenience at the expense of individual rights.
All of this might be tolerable if the changes were temporary in nature; after all, war time conditions have, in the past, produced sharp limitations on individual rights. But this “war on terror,” unlike other wars in our history has no clearly defined enemy, no clearly defined goals, and most importantly, no clearly defined end point. As the present administration has said repeatedly, this is a war that may never end. Thus those who are held without charges and without trial “for the duration of the war” are effectively given a life sentence. . James Madison in 1795, then a Congressman from Virginia, observed:
"Of all enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it compromises and develops the germ of every other. ….[T]he discretionary power of the executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people.
The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced to inequalities of fortunes and opportunities for fraud growing out of a state of war … and the degeneracy of manners and morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
The Bush Administration is not the first to take the unspoken position that the constitution is obsolete or at least, not applicable to current conditions.
But it is the first to seek more or less permanent institutional changes that will, if they survive, last indefinitely. Further the changes sought are unprecedented in their scope.
We are not without experience in this approach by our government. In recent times, the national government has been engaged in another war that will never end. The “war on drugs” has produced a never ending plea from government authorities for greater police power to invade privacy, to conduct broad searches, to gain additional advantages in prosecuting those charged with drug crimes and to lengthen the prison terms of those convicted.
Regrettably, Congress and our courts have been all too willing to set aside the wisdom and experience of the framers of our constitution and give the government the additional powers it seeks.
The results of these efforts were predictable; the experience of the constitutional framers could have told us that repression of rights is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. But alas, our elected officials paid no attention to that experience.
It is fair to ask whether our constitution is obsolete. After all, a constitutional scheme created more than 218 years ago could not have contemplated the national and international difficulties we face today. And the framers of that scheme were wise enough to include provisions for change.
And we have made some substantial changes in that scheme through that amendatory process. Consider: we have assured the right to freedom of conscience and expression; we have specified individual legal rights in civil and criminal trials while imposing limitations on government power to investigate and prosecute the accused; we have rearranged the manner in which the President and the Senate are elected to better reflect the will of the people; we have extended the right to human dignity to a whole class of persons previously regarded as property of as economic servants; we have extended and guaranteed the right to vote to women, racial minorities and young adults (who by the way, made up a majority of the population when the nation was formed); we have guaranteed basic federal rights, privileges and immunities to individuals previously at the mercy of the state political systems.
These examples offer a guide to the pattern of our society. Over the more than 200 hundred years since the framing of the constitution our “corrections” to the system have almost universally been extensions of freedom rather than retractions of freedoms granted by the founding fathers and mothers.
From this record one might conclude that if the constitutional scheme is obsolete, it is more likely to need stronger restrictions on government rather than greater government power over the individual.
But we are told our present situation presents threats not previously experienced and certainly not experienced by those who framed the constitutional rights we have come to expect. Let us briefly look at the life and times of founders to test the claim that modern threats are unique.
Were the framers abstract thinkers who idealized the relationship between the government and individuals? Did they structure a government that was not practical in times of crisis? For those who know our history these questions are almost laughable. The framers of the constitution included dedicated patriots who put their lives on the line by declaring independence from Great Britain and by taking up arms in defense of personal freedom and the right to have a voice in government.
These were men –George Washington,, Thomas Mifflin, Charles Pinckney and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Nathaniel Gorham and Rufus King – who endured the worst of the Revolutionary War era at the lost of personal fortunes and countless friends. They experienced and witnessed the measures taken by the English government to suppress what it regarded as treason, insurrection and terrorism.
And following the end of hostilities, these men saw the effect of public insecurity – sometimes producing armed resistance to government and to the rule of law. These were not academic theoreticians. These were men of action, men of practical experience with crisis; I dare say that the threats we face today pale in comparison to the threats which were a way of life for these men everyday, in every way for more than eight years.
Nor were the framers without experience in government. We must recall that the Constitutional convention was called to reform a failing system – The Article of Confederation installed in 1781. They were confronted with a failing system of government at a time when we were threatened militarily and diplomatically by the two great powers in the world- France and Britain; the states were competing with each other for land, for commercial advantage both in foreign and domestic trade; and there was some chance that either the New England states or the Southern states would cut a separate deal with Britain.
For more than five years the framers struggled without success, to make that system work. In the end, they decided to scrap their system of government and build a new one. Abstract exercises in political science did not drive them to that conclusion; rather it was practical experience.
The chief obstacle they faced was the reluctance to create a strong central government. They came by that reluctance honestly. They saw how power was exercised by the King, by the British Administration of the Colonies and for some like Benjamin Franklin, by the foreign governments in France and Holland. On the other hand, absolute state sovereignty made national government impossible.
At bottom, the task was to create a government which could unite the nation without creating a government which could oppress its people. They knew that power without limitations was tyranny yet a government without sufficient power was not worthy of support.
It is true that the framers expected protection of individual rights to be the job of the states. Thus the record of debates at the convention reveals that the overwhelming attention was paid to the relationship between the branches of government and between the federal and state governments.
This view, subsequently rejected by the ratifying conventions, was based on the belief that the national government could be held in check so that enumerating rights was unnecessary and, in fact, dangerous to the extent that broad limitations on powers not granted opened the door to the claim that the power must exist if limitations to it are set out.
Several state ratified the constitutional while urging amendments providing for the additional protection of individual rights. Congress made that a priority when it convened in 1789; it proposed 12 amendments which the states considered, adopting 10 of them as our “Bill of Rights” in 1791. Now, it must be observed that the state ratifying conventions for the Constitution and the state legislatures approving the “Bill of Rights” were not academic theoreticians either. These were practical men with constituencies to be served. Many shared the experience of the framers in war and government.
In another era of our history, government – and the constitution – faced a truly unparalleled threat. State sponsored armed insurrection in 1861 lead to the attempt of 11 states to secede from the United States.
The President and the Congress found the government figuratively and literally, located on the edge of the battlefield. The dead and wounded were brought by the thousands to hospitals in the nation’s capital. Desperate times called for desperate action. President Lincoln and the Congress responded. In the aftermath of the war, repressive government actions were rescinded and sometimes criticized as unnecessarily harsh and extreme.
And significantly, the Constitution was amended in what some have called the “Second American Revolution” to guarantee the vote, due process and equal protection of the law to all persons subject to the laws of the states. The men who fashioned those amendments were not fuzzy-headed intellectuals who were seeking some idealized form of government. They were practical politicians doing the best they could to address what they experienced as obstacles to achieving an acceptable level of justice in society.
Accountability
Of course, the Constitution is merely a piece of paper. Its worth rests in the extent to which it is made to work as a system of rights. The philosophers who studied government in the 16th and 17th Century observed that absolute power is a corrupting force. The American thinkers who struggled with a form of government for our states and nation concluded that not only must power be dispersed but some system of accountability must be built into that system.
In our constitutional system, the Courts provide the means to hold the Congress, the President and the state governments accountable to the constitutional limits.
Throughout our history the Courts have been the guardians of our liberties.
As is true with any institution, the judiciary is no better than the people who operate it.
Over history the course of judicial protection of liberty has been anything but consistent. Part of the explanation for the inconsistency is the changing attitudes toward the power of the national government to limit state invasions of individual liberty.
For the first 40 years of federal court history, national power was dominant in the view of the Court; politicians including Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Jackson did not share that view. For the next 30 years, states asserted their “sovereignty” to the extreme, culminating in a direct challenge to federal power and the Civil War.
The Civil War Amendments settled the general legal questions surrounding federal powers but the Courts construed the Amendments narrowly permitting the states considerable powers in restricting personal and civil liberties. In the post World War I era the Courts began to recognize the values expressed and implied in the Bill of Rights and for the next 50 years the federal courts were at their apex as the guardian of liberties.
Since the 1970’s the Supreme Court and hence the federal courts, have taken a much more reserved position, deferring to the legislative and executive branches to fashion individual protections. Congress, and many state legislatures, has indeed enacted categorical protections for speech and religion and protections for special classes such as disabled persons and the aged.
But in the past 20 years, a much more conservative court has ruled that Congress lacks the power to impose broad protections on the states.
With that brief excursus into history, we return to our current situation. Our liberties are held hostage to claims of national security by a government that is hostile to personal freedoms.
We are in a “war on terror” that has no end. In the name of fighting that never-ending war, Congress has enacted sweeping provisions for increased law enforcement power and restricted protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Until the politics of the Congress and of the Executive branch changes, our only protection will be the Constitution and the courts.
Will the courts allow the government to conduct secret searches? Will the government be permitted to conduct investigatory searches without a particularized warrant and without judicial authorization? Will the government be able to arrest a citizen and hold them indefinitely without charges and without a trial?
In passing let me observe that the questions I just posed have a familiar ring to them; they almost mirror the grievances against the King recited by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. But our question is whether the Constitution is suited to deal with modern problems.
As noted, our history reveals that we have faced crises before. I have cited the larger crises to demonstrate that our current crisis is hardly unique even if you compare it to war time. In fact it might be instructive to review “war time” actions by the government in dealing with national security issues. In the interest of time and focus, permit to review just one such action with which I believe you are all familiar.
In World War II, the President acting as Commander in Chief, authorized exclusion and incarceration orders for the West Coast to remove and imprison tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans, 80,000 of which were citizens of the United States. Two years after the “detainees” had been locked up, their case reached the US Supreme Court. The government won that case in a 5-4 decision over strong dissenting opinions.
Put aside the fact that we subsequently learned that the government lied and misrepresented the facts in the judicial process and the fact that the government action and the court decision came to be a national disgrace. The point is that the constitutional processes were available and functioned. I suppose it is worth noting further that due process of law does not guarantee the correct result. But Dred Scott could have told you that 150 years ago.
How does the Constitution respond to crisis like the national security threats we face?
If the claim is that the Constitution isn’t up to the task, we should at least note what the Constitution does provide. To begin, we need to understand that the Constitution is the text and the gloss put on that text by over two hundred years of judicial interpretation.
To boils things down to a manageable discussion, generally, the Constitution does not recognize “emergency” as a justification for suspending the requirements of the Constitution.
Presidents have frequently made that claim in one form or another, and in one context or another and the Court has universally rejected it. The meaning is clear; the constitutional processes are deemed adequate to deal with emergency situations.
And what are those processes? Again cutting to the chase so to speak, since almost no constitutional rights are absolute, the government can infringe those rights if and only if it can show that it has a compelling governmental interest and that its action is necessary to serve that interest.
It is not easy for the government to meet this exactly standard and that is as it should be. Infringement of constitutionally protected rights should not be easy.
The long history of government claims of national security as a justification for deprivation of rights is instructive.
From 1798 when the Alien and Sedition Acts suppressed criticism of the government policy and officials to 2001 and the US Patriot Act, the government agenda is driven, as much by partisan interests as it is by security needs.
Just like Madison Avenue selling the latest fad of over the counter medicine, politicians drum up the need in order to sell the product. As Lincoln is reported to have advised, you can fool some of the people some of the time. But sooner or later enough people cannot be fooled.
And at this point we should be reminded that the Constitution places the ultimate power in the people.
In our history, the political solution has removed restrictions on civil liberties that were enacted in times of crises; that is the solution which the Bill of Rights Defense Committee has so effectively advanced.
Over the long haul, that may be a satisfactory solution. But people sitting in prison without charges and without trial understandably, do not want to wait- nor should they have to.
And when you apply for a job ten years from now and are denied because of information in your government file which information was gathered in a secret search 10 years earlier, long haul solutions don’t help much.
Our Constitution is a piece of paper, a contract between the people and the government as some like to say. But like any other contract, it isn’t worth much if it can’t be enforced.
The terms of the contract are not obsolete nor do crisis conditions require setting the contract aside.
Its terms provide for dealing with crisis and its processes are adaptable enough to deal with contemporary problems. But your government has not asked for expedited processes to deal with the world as it exists today.
Instead it has asked to be excused from meeting constitutional standards in a broad array of situations.
The framers of our constitution created a government based on their hopes for a better, more just society. They had every reason to respond to their fears but they chose a more promising path.
We have legitimate fears today just as our founders had legitimate fears. Are we not able to deal with those fears without sacrificing our hopes for a better, more just society?
Are we less able or courageous than our forefathers?
We are better educated, more experienced and have more resources than our American ancestors.
Surely we can find the strength, courage and wisdom to establish a proper balance between liberty and security.
1955 marked the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Chief Justice John Marshall, the great lawyer, statesman and jurist who defined our constitution and establish the rule of law for our nation. In that celebration, Chief Justice Earl Warren noted Marshall’s many accomplishments then turned to the balance between stability and freedom.
For all his accomplishments, Marshall “could not perpetuate either stability or freedom. Every generation must earn those things for itself.
Our problems … are as pressing as [the problems] in the days of John Marshall and call for the same devotion to constitutional principles.” This year marks the 250th Anniversary of John Marshall’s birth and the message remains the same. Each generation must earn its freedom. Are we up to the task?
JSTOR: Our Obsolete Constitution
The essential ques- tion is the need of the third--is the Constitution obsolete? Mr. Wallace's argument under this, his main head, is by no means convincing ...Similar pages - Note this
JSTOR: Our Obsolete Constitution
University of Chicago WILLIAM W. SWEET Our Obsolete Constitution. By William Kay Wallace (New York: The John Day Company, 1932. 226 pp. Appendix. $2.00. ...Similar pages - Note this [ More results from links.jstor.org ]
Guns and the Constitution
If we have a "living Constitution" onto which courts may graft new rights, why can't they prune away obsolete ones? These are genuinely tough questions, ...www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/gunconst.htm - 9k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
And Here Is A Question That Has Become An American Obsession
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1566715.stm
Guns are deeply rooted within Swiss culture - but the gun crime rate is so low that statistics are not even kept.
The country has a population of six million, but there are estimated to be at least two million publicly-owned firearms, including about 600,000 automatic rifles and 500,000 pistols.
This is in a very large part due to Switzerland's unique system of national defence, developed over the centuries.
Instead of a standing, full-time army, the country requires every man to undergo some form of military training for a few days or weeks a year throughout most of their lives.
Between the ages of 21 and 32 men serve as frontline troops. They are given an M-57 assault rifle and 24 rounds of ammunition which they are required to keep at home.
Once discharged, men serve in the Swiss equivalent of the US National Guard, but still have to train occasionally and are given bolt rifles. Women do not have to own firearms, but are encouraged to.
Few restrictions
In addition to the government-provided arms, there are few restrictions on buying weapons. Some cantons restrict the carrying of firearms - others do not.
The government even sells off surplus weaponry to the general public when new equipment is introduced.
Guns and shooting are popular national pastimes. More than 200,000 Swiss attend national annual marksmanship competitions.
But despite the wide ownership and availability of guns, violent crime is extremely rare. There are only minimal controls at public buildings and politicians rarely have police protection.
Mark Eisenecker, a sociologist from the University of Zurich told BBC News Online that guns are "anchored" in Swiss society and that gun control is simply not an issue.
Some pro-gun groups argue that Switzerland proves their contention that there is not necessarily a link between the availability of guns and violent crime in society.
Low crime
But other commentators suggest that the reality is more complicated.
Switzerland is one of the world's richest countries, but has remained relatively isolated.
It has none of the social problems associated with gun crime seen in other industrialised countries like drugs or urban deprivation.
Despite the lack of rigid gun laws, firearms are strictly connected to a sense of collective responsibility.
From an early age Swiss men and women associate weaponry with being called to defend their country.
Gonzales says the Constitution doesn't guarantee habeas corpus ...
"The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas,'' Gonzales told Sen. - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Ed Cognoski: UT law professor says US Constitution obsolete
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml
BUSH ON THE CONSTITUTION: ‘IT’S JUST A GODDAMNED PIECE OF PAPER’ By DOUG THOMPSONDec 5, 2005, 07:53
Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “
There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”And, to the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the shit that this group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that “goddamned piece of paper” used to guarantee.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the “Constitution is an outdated document.”Put aside, for a moment, political affiliation or personal beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent. It doesn’t matter if you support the invasion or Iraq or not.
Despite our differences, the Constitution has stood for two centuries as the defining document of our government, the final source to determine “in the end ” if something is legal or right.
Every federal official - including the President - who takes an oath of office swears to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.”Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says he cringes when someone calls the Constitution a “living document.”“Oh, how I hate the phrase we have “a ‘living document,” Scalia says. “We now have a Constitution that means whatever we want it to mean. The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete’s sake.”As a judge, Scalia says, “I don’t have to prove that the Constitution is perfect; I just have to prove that it’s better than anything else.”
President Bush has proposed seven amendments to the Constitution over the last five years, including a controversial amendment to define marriage as a “union between a man and woman.” Members of Congress have proposed some 11,000 amendments over the last decade, ranging from repeal of the right to bear arms to a Constitutional ban on abortion.
Scalia says the danger of tinkering with the Constitution comes from a loss of rights.“We can take away rights just as we can grant new ones,” Scalia warns. “Don’t think that it’s a one-way street.”And don’t buy the White House hype that the USA Patriot Act is a necessary tool to fight terrorism.
It is a dangerous law that infringes on the rights of every American citizen and, as one brave aide told President Bush, something that undermines the Constitution of the United States.
But why should Bush care? After all, the Constitution is just “a goddamned piece of paper.”
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0117-29.htm
Hey Mainstream Media! Why Doesn’t Presidential Dismantling of the Constitution Warrant the Same Intense Scrutiny as Presidential Adultery?
by Andrew Bard Schmookler
Eight years ago, a president entering his sixth year in office came under suspicion: had he conducted an adulterous affair with a young intern? For months thereafter, the media could talk of little else. It was the national topic of conversation for most of that year. The House eventually impeached the president, and the Senate tried him.
Now again, a president entering his sixth year in office has come under suspicion: has he deliberately and unjustifiably violated both the Constitution and federal statutes by conducting searches without a warrant? But this suspicion is not getting anything like the kind of media attention of the Monica Lewinsky story.
Why is that?
The presidential oath of office states: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Thus the core of his job is expressed in terms of defending, not our standard of living, nor even the general welfare, but our Constitution itself.
So why was Monica more deserving of attention? None of the possible “explanations” can stand as justifications.
1) The grounds for suspecting President Bush of violating both the letter and the spirit of his oath of office are not weaker than were the grounds for suspecting President Clinton of hanky-panky with an intern.
2) The possible wrong-doing by the current president would in no way be less important for Americans to confront than the wrong-doing of his predecessor; indeed, the present suspicion against the president is precisely the kind of thing that most worried our Founding Fathers.
3) The media may assume that the American people are less interested in protecting the Constitution than in sex scandals, but they haven’t bothered to test that proposition. And even if it were true, that would not justify the failure of the press to fulfill its duty as watchdog and protector of our democracy.
Grounds for Suspicion
The president has admitted to ordering wiretaps to be conducted without getting the court warrants required by the 4th Amendment to the Constitution and by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. To justify his actions, he and his people have made two claims: first, that they had the legal authority to do so; and second, that their actions were required for the sake of national security in a time of war.
It is hardly reassuring about the moral and intellectual integrity of this administration that the legal justifications offered thus far are regarded as almost laughably flimsy by the independent legal authorities who have commented on them.
First, they’ve claimed that the congressional authorization to fight the terrorists abroad, passed in the aftermath of 9/11, also authorized domestic surveillance. But the language of the enabling legislation supports no such claim, and the record of the debate at the time suggests that the Bush administration fully understood that such authorization would require additional provisions that Congress expressly declined to enact. In addition, why would President Bush have given his subsequent (false) public reassurance that his administration abides by the requirement to get warrants before conducting searches if he felt he’d been authorized by Congress to do otherwise?
Second, the Bush administration claims that the powers constitutionally given to the president as commander-in-chief permits him to do whatever he pleases in waging war, regardless of the law or of the prerogatives of the other branches of the government. Such a claim has been widely regarded by legal scholars as baseless as a reading of the Constitution, and as antithetical to the whole spirit of our constitutional system.
Still, there could be important national security reasons for a president to violate the law. And it’s possible that the American people –whether wisely or not—would be willing to allow the president to take illegal measures if they were required to defend the nation. But here, too, there are also reasons to doubt the presidential claims that his apparently illegal actions have been required by the demands of national security.
FISA created a court especially for the purpose of issuing such warrants, and it has issued many thousands of such warrants, while refusing only four. The law even makes provision for those situations in which urgency makes it impractical to go first to court: the executive has three whole days after emergency surveillance to come to the court for its actions to be scrutinized and validated.
So what legitimate national security reason might there be that would have prevented the president from both protecting the nation and obeying the law and the Constitution?
There remain strong grounds for suspicion that the president was serving no national good, but only hijacking power that the Framers of the Constitution expressly sought to deny him. And it does not help allay our concerns that this conducting of warrantless searches fits into a "pattern of disregard” for legal restraints, both domestic and international. But if the president has a good justification, let us hear it.
In any event, why isn’t President Bush being pressed to provide justification, and why isn’t the evidence being explored publicly with the same intensity that was devoted to the Lewinsky affair?
The Most Vital of National Interests
The moral character of the president in his private life does matter. As the most prominent personal embodiment of the nation, the president inevitably is a kind of role model. So President Clinton’s dalliance was not altogether irrelevant to his fulfillment of his job as president.
But the suspicions about President Bush’s abandonment of his core oath to protect the Constitution relate to the very core of his presidential responsibilities.
As the oath makes clear, the Constitution is the heart and soul of America. It is the inner sanctum that our public servants swear to protect; the great gift that our soldiers have fought and died for, the very foundation of our national identity. Even while we Americans divide on many issues, the sanctity of the Constitution is what unites us. It is our core assertion to the world that “we are a nation of laws, not of men.”
In this context, what could matter more than whether the President of the United States is honoring his oath of office, or whether he is treating the Constitution as an obstacle to be casually, needlessly swept aside?
Our Founding Fathers certainly would have known that this is an absolutely major story. The system of checks and balances was not a casual thing. It was a profound vision they had on meeting the challenge of how to avoid tyranny. And, as human history shows, the avoidance of tyranny is no small accomplishment. Free and decent societies have been few.
The fourth amendment protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” represented the Founding Fathers’ understanding, based on the millennia of human history in which they were schooled, of the tools of tyranny. If the King does not need the approval of the Judge to invade the privacy of the citizen, freedom is imperiled. So “We the People” determined that the court would serve as a check and a balance against the potentially tyrannical power of the executive.
If there was no imperative need for President Bush to conduct searches without first getting a warrant, then why did he do it? Would he grab a tyrant’s powers if he didn’t have a tyrant’s intentions?
We urgently need an independent investigation to discover just what purposes were being served by these warrantless wiretaps. Was this monitoring confined to those people who might reasonably be suspected of being a terrorist threat to America? Or were people perhaps chosen as targets for surveillance simply because they were political opponents of this president and his policies?
What could be more important than to know whether the great achievement of our Founding Fathers is being dismantled? But one would hardly know anything of such vital importance was at stake from watching how our mainstream media are dealing with this possible constitutional crisis.
What Master Is the Media Serving?
Is the reason for the media’s casualness in treating this administration’s possible running roughshod over the Constitution that the media don’t think this story will grab an audience the way, say, stains on a blue dress did?
But how would they know?
Watergate certainly transfixed the nation thirty-some years ago.
If Linda Tripp’s disclosures had been given no more play than those of the NSA’s warrantless spying on Americans, would people have gotten so swept up in the that affair? And if the present suspicions of presidential usurpation of powers were getting the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that Clinton’s extramarital dalliance received, might the American people be just as engaged in this story?
Recall that the upshot of the Lewinsky affair was that the American people, while repelled by Clinton’s conduct, mostly rallied to his defense. Though the House impeached him, and the Senate tried him, the president’s approval ratings climbed to levels exceeding those preceding the scandal—presumably because the American people decided that the assault on Clinton was an even bigger scandal than the president’s inability to control his sexual impulses. This was not, a majority of the American people decided, a matter that warranted bringing to bear the heaviest of constitutional machinery to bear to remove a president.
When the Congress investigated Watergate, however, President Nixon benefited from no such rallying of popular support. The public recognized that the abuse of presidential power was a vital national concern. There is simply no evidence from the Watergate story that the defense of our political system has no “sex appeal” to the American public.
So why then do the mainstream media not treat this with the urgency that they gave to Monicagate? Is the difference perhaps not in the nature of the possible offense, but in the nature of the media’s relationship to the respective presidents? Just what master is themedia serving?
Even if the American people did prove to be slow to care, is it not the job of the media not just to pander to public interests but also to direct public attention to the important public business of the times? Is it not the ultimate job of the press not just to get ratings and make a profit but also to serve the public interest?
The danger of a tyrant arising in the executive and abusing his power was far more compelling to our Founding Fathers than the danger of our being unable to defend ourselves against foreign threats. Would our Founders have accepted, without stringent proof, that America has had to adopt the police-state tactics of this commander-in-chief to protect ourselves against outside enemies?
James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, in promoting our Constitution: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
And then there is the line widely attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
If Jefferson and Madison were alive now to see the lack of vigilance of the mainstream America media in the face of these suspected threats to our constitutional protections against tyranny, they’d turn over in their graves.
If tyranny is not stopped in its earliest stages, it only grows stronger and becomes still more difficult and dangerous to stop.
Andrew Bard Schmookler has recently launched his website devoted to understanding the roots of America’s present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states. Email to: andythebard@comcast.net
Cornell University Source Library
http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/index.php/Constitutional_law
Common Dreams NewsCenter www.commondreams.org
THE STRANGE DEATH OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: END GAME IN OHIO by Michael Keefer
www.globalresearch.ca 24 January 2005
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE501A.html
So who ever thought the 2004 U.S. presidential election had the remotest chance of being honest and democratic?
Not, one might guess, the electronic voting security experts like Ken Thompson, Roy Saltman, Rebecca Mercuri, Bruce Schneier, Doug Jones, Victoria Collier, Aviel Rubin, Lynn Landes, and Bev Harris, who have for years been warning that the new voting technology coming into use in the United States offers unprecedented opportunities for electoral fraud.[1]
Probably not Osama bin Laden, who made his much-anticipated Jack-in-the-Box video appearance three days before polling day: wearing a gold-lamé hospital gown in front of a blank shower curtain, and with a nose that looked to have been quite recently punched flat, he landed some anti-Bush shots that Rush Limbaugh and the other ring-tailed roarers of the American right were happy to interpret as a last-minute endorsement of John Kerry.[2]
And certainly not Republican Congressional Representative Peter King, who made an equally notable video statement on the afternoon of November 2nd, long before the polls closed, in the course of a White House function that seemed to have put him into a celebratory mood. "It's already over," he told the interviewer. "The election's over. We won." Asked how he knew at that early hour, King replied: "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."[3]
One of the people who took care of the counting--and who was responsible as well for some of the most decisive crookedness of the election, and the most flagrant illegalities of the post-election cover-up--is J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State.
To give the man his due, Blackwell is at once more discreet and more grotesquely Orwellian than the tipsy Congressman King. Rather than flaunting his election-stealing prowess, he has preferred to boast in a Washington Times op-ed that while the election in Ohio was not in all respects perfect ("a seven-hour wait" outside polling stations, he acknowledges, "is clearly unacceptable"), it was nonetheless "perfectly inspiring--a testament to the strength and power of our democratic system, the commitment of American voters to have their voices heard and the integrity of the process that encouraged participation and demanded fairness."[4]
Prior to the election, this versatile ironist was reported to be "coming out strong" in support of the proposal to ban same-sex marriage: in late October, Blackwell made an appearance with Pastor Rod Parsley, president of "The Center for Moral Clarity," in the course of which he edified "an energized crowd" in the "Cathedral of Praise" by telling them that the notion of same-sex couples "even defies barnyard logic [...] the barnyard knows better."[5]
But Blackwell's talent--and his affliction--goes beyond irony or hypocrisy into a more permanent state of inversion that one might think of as resembling the punishment reported by the poet Dante for religiously inflected fraud.[6] In another speech in the same week of October--the context this time being his refusal to obey a federal court order requiring him to comply with the Help America Vote Act--Blackwell compared himself, in his willingness to endure the unlikely punishment of imprisonment, to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Apostle Paul. A spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party's Voter Protection Program offered the appropriate rejoinder: "Many civil rights leaders went to jail to defend the right to vote. If this official wants to go to jail to thwart it, that would be unfortunate."[7]
The talented Mr. Blackwell has garnered praise for having launched "The Ohio Center for Civic Character: A Citizen Education Initiative of the Ohio Secretary of State." The Center's goal, "a revolution of character-building in our great state," is to be achieved by providing "today's generation of leaders" with "a shared vocabulary of character-building ethics" which Blackwell calls "Uncommon Sense."[8] It may come as no surprise that one of his most recent public appearances prior to the Bush inauguration was a lecture, delivered on January 12th, 2005 to an exclusive audience at the Scioto Country Club in rural southern Ohio, on the subject of "Ethics in Leadership."[9]
Like the unsavoury Katherine Harris, who was Florida Secretary of State in 2000 and simultaneously state Chair of the Florida Bush-Cheney campaign, Kenneth Blackwell occupied a strategic double position as Co-Chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign and Secretary of State in what analysts correctly anticipated would be the key swing state of the 2004 election. From this position, a growing body of evidence shows, he was able to oversee a partisan and racist pre-election purging of the electoral rolls,[10] a clearly partisan reduction of the number of voting precincts in counties won by Gore in 2000 (a move that helped suppress the 2004 Democratic turnout),[11] a partisan and racist misallocation of voting machines (which effectively disenfranchised tens of thousands of African-American voters),[12] a partisan and racist system of polling-place challenges (which together with electoral roll purges obliged many scores of thousands of African-Americans to vote with 'second-class-citizen' provisional ballots),[13] and a fraudulent pre-programming of touch-screen voting machines that produced a systematic 'flipping' of Democratic votes into Bush's tally or the trash can.[14]
In a nation that enforced its own laws, the misallocation of voting machines--a clear violation of the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution--would alone have sufficed to invalidate the Ohio election.
Having overseen one of the more flagrantly corrupt elections in recent American history, Blackwell and his Republican machine proceeded to "take care of the counting"--which involved a partisan and racist dismissal of scores of thousands of African-American ballots as "spoiled,"[15] a flagrantly illegal "lock-down" of the vote-tallying process in Warren County on the transparently false grounds of a supposed terrorist threat,[16] massive electronic vote-tabulation fraud in this and other south-western Ohio counties,[17] and marginally less flagrant but evidently systematic forms of 'ghost-voting' and vote theft elsewhere in the state.[18]
Blackwell then saw to it (with the active assistance of partisan Republican judges, and the passive assistance of a strangely supine Democratic Party) that no even partial recount--let alone anything resembling a voting-machine or vote-tabulator audit--could get under way prior to the selection of Ohio's Republican electors to the Electoral College.[19]
He also did his utmost to block public access to election data, ordering the Boards of Election in all eighty-eight Ohio counties to prevent public inspection of poll books until after certification of the vote, which he delayed until December 6th.[20] On December 10th, his Election Administrator, Pat Wolfe, intervened to prevent analysis of poll-book data by ordering, on Blackwell's authority, a renewed "lock-down" of voting records in Greene County and the entire state. (According to Ohio Revised Code Title XXXV Elections, Sec. 3503.26, such records are to be open to the public; Ohio Revised Code Sec. 3599.42 explicitly declares that any violation of Title XXXV "constitutes a prima facie case of election fraud....")[21]
Bizarrely enough, on the night following the statement to election observers in Greene County that all voter records in the State of Ohio were "locked down" and "not considered public records," the Greene County offices were left unlocked: when the same election observers returned at 10:15 on the morning of Saturday, December 11th, they found the building open, a light on in the office (which had not been on when it was closed on the evening of the 10th), and all of the poll books and voting machines unsecured.[22]
When at last the Green and Libertarian parties' lawyers were able to obtain a recount, Blackwell presided over one that was fully as corrupt as the election had been. Sample hand recounts were to be carried out in each county, involving randomly-selected precincts constituting at least three percent of the vote; any disagreements between the sample recount and the official tally were supposed to prompt a full county-wide hand recount. According to Green Party observers, however, a substantial proportion of Ohio's eighty-eight counties broke the law by not selecting their hand-recount precincts randomly.[23]
There is evidence, most crucially, that Triad Governmental Systems, the private corporation responsible for servicing the vote-tabulation machines in about half of the state, tampered with selected machines in counties across Ohio immediately before the recount in order to ensure that the sample recount tallies would conform with the official vote tallies.[24] (Triad's technicians knew which machines to tamper with because, it would appear, Board of Election officials, in open violation of the law, told them which precincts had been pre-selected.)
Despite this widespread tampering, there were discrepancies in at least six counties between the sample hand recounts and the official tallies--and yet the Board of Elections refused to conduct full county-wide hand recounts.[25] As David Swanson writes,
"Only one county conducted a full hand recount, which resulted in 6 percent more votes than in the original vote. Those extra votes were evenly split between Kerry and Bush, but--even assuming that one county's votes have now been properly counted--how do we know where votes in the other 87 counties would fall? Should an extra several percent of them show up, and should they be weighted toward Kerry, the election would not have yet been what the media keeps telling us it is: over.[26]
Although required by law as Secretary of State to investigate electoral irregularities, Blackwell consistently refused to do so. He refused to respond to a formal letter from John Conyers and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus itemizing a host of alleged improprieties and asking what he had done to correct or investigate them. He also refused to testify in lawsuits against him arising from the election and its aftermath--in the expectation, no doubt, that any cases not declared moot once George W. Bush was safely reconfirmed as president by the votes of the Electoral College and of Congress would be dealt with by higher courts dominated by Republican judges.
Katherine Harris's reward for her work in throwing the 2000 Florida election to Bush was a safe seat in Congress. Kenneth Blackwell has named his prize: he wants to be Governor of Ohio. In a post-election fundraising letter soliciting funds for his governorship campaign, he takes credit for delivering Ohio to George W. Bush--and thus, since Ohio decided the national outcome, for ensuring his second term as president:
"I have no doubt the strong campaign we helped the President run in Ohio--coupled with a similar effort I helped deliver for State Issue One (the Marriage Protection Amendment)--can easily be credited with turning out record numbers of conservatives and evangelicals on Election Day. [....] And, I draw great satisfaction in hearing liberal members of the media credit the Marriage Protection Amendment as [the] single most important factor that drove President Bush over the top in Ohio."
In the same letter, true to the general inversion of his world view, Blackwell takes credit for his success in preventing electoral fraud:
"I have never shied away from the giving the liberals fits. And I'm sure that with all the potential voter-fraud we prevented during this last election, they will be looking to get even with me in my next political campaign. [....] As Secretary of State, I have been sued almost 30 times since this summer because I stood up for the rights of voters like you and against liberal trial lawyers and activist judges who wanted to give this election to Senator Kerry. [....] When the ACLU and the other members of the radical left worked to stop me from cracking down and prohibiting outrageous ways to commit voter fraud, I fought back and won."[27]
But what precisely does it mean to say that lawyers and judges who sought to protect the rights of minority voters from Blackwell's manifold vote-suppression tactics would have 'given' the election to Kerry? This sounds rather like a coded acknowledgment of a Republican truth that was, notoriously, voiced openly in July 2004 by a Republican state representative in nearby Michigan: "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote"--for Ohio, substitute the Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, or Toledo vote--"we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle."[28]
The Ohio recount of the presidential vote was declared officially terminated on December 28th, a day that in the Roman Catholic calendar of saints commemorates the Slaughter of the Innocents. With a derisory alteration of the official count (Kerry received an additional 734 votes, and Bush 449), George W. Bush retained a certified victory margin in Ohio of 118,755 votes--still large enough to look decisive, though well down from the lead of over 136,000 he was credited with in the first official tallies. As Bob Fitrakis, Steven Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman have remarked, the end came
"amidst bitter dispute over official certification of impossible voter turnout numbers, over the refusal of Ohio's Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice to recuse himself from crucial court challenges involving his own re-election campaign, over the Republican Secretary of State's refusal to testify under subpoena, over apparent tampering with tabulation machines, over more than 100,000 provisional and machine-rejected ballots left uncounted, over major discrepancies in certified vote counts and turnout ratios, and over a wide range of unresolved disputes that continue to leave the true outcome of Ohio's presidential vote in serious doubt."[29]
The end to the post-election process as a whole came on January 6th, 2005, when the United States House of Representatives and Senate, the assembled Congress of the American republic, voted to ratify the votes cast by the Electoral College--an act which formally made George W. Bush President for the next four years.
What is normally a purely ceremonial state occasion was interrupted, this year, by the brief irruption of a more authentic form of human dignity. Ohio Democratic Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, supported by California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, rose to challenge the Ohio results, thereby forcing the Senate and House of Representatives to separate in order to conduct, in Tubbs-Jones' words, "a formal and legitimate debate about election irregularities," and to engage, if only for the two hours prescribed for such a debate, with the arguments of those Democratic representatives and senators whose sense of ethics and of duty had led them to join what Boxer called "the fight for electoral justice."[30]
As Mark Weisbrot wrote in an article published by the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, Republican lawmakers responded to Senator Boxer, and to Representative Tubbs-Jones and her colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, "with howls of derision."[31] Some engaged in ad hominem tactics, labeling the objections "base" and "outrageous" (David Hobson, R-Ohio), and calling the objectors "aspiring fantasy authors" of "wild conspiracy theories," whose behaviour exemplified "their party's primary strategy to obstruct, to divide, to destroy" (Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio).
Others denounced the debate itself as "a travesty" (Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania), a "squandering [of the Senate's] time" by people "who persist in beating a dead horse" (Senator George Voinovich, R-Ohio); or, more gravely, as an exercise that "in the midst of a global war on terrorism [...] clearly emboldens those who would in fact undermine the prospect of democracy" (David Dreier (R-California), and "an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy" by the "X-Files wing" of the Democratic Party (Tom DeLay, R-Texas).
Out of this sound and fury there emerged the dim outline of a theory of Democracy-as-Confidence-Trick--according to which criticism must be silenced because, as House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Missouri) put it,
"Every time we attack the process, we cast that doubt on that fabric of democracy that is so important. People do have to have confidence that the process works in a proper way. They don't need to believe that it is absolutely perfect because after all it's the greatest democracy in the history of the world. And it's run by people who step forward and make a system work in ways that nobody would believe until they see it [...]."
Take away the pseudo-democratic pieties, and what's left as sub-text is a simpler message. In the laconic formulation of Ric Keller (R-Florida): "Get over it."[32]
An overwhelming majority in Congress was anxious to do just that. Ohio's Electoral College votes, together with those from all the other states, were ratified by votes of 267 to 31 in the House of Representatives, and 74 to 1 in the Senate.
What, exactly, were these large majorities agreeing to "get over"? Residual stirrings of anger--or possibly, on the Republican side, of conscience--over the fact that for the second time in a row a presidential election has been marked by appalling levels of corruption and fraud?
Ah, but while Al Gore won the popular vote nationwide in the 2000 election by some 540,000 votes--and would, it seems, have won Florida too, had the Supreme Court not intervened to stop the vote count, by as many as 23,000 votes[33]--aren't things different this time? Ohio this time may have been a mess--no one's "absolutely perfect," even in "the greatest democracy in the history of the world"--but didn't George W. Bush win the nationwide popular vote in November 2004 by several million votes?
Do you really think so? How interesting. How--let me borrow a term from the lexicon of George W. Bush's newly confirmed Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales--how "quaint."
Ohio was the swing state of swing states on November 2nd, 2004, the one whose twenty Electoral College votes decided the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. It is therefore a matter of some significance that the testimonial evidence of corruption in the Ohio election is corroborated by statistical evidence which shows the election in this state--and nationwide--to have been not just corrupt, but stolen.
The evidence in both categories is massively complex. But thanks to the no less massive analytical labours over the past two months of citizen pro-democracy activists, of social scientists, of mathematicians and statisticians, of computer programmers, and of alternative-media investigative journalists, it can nonetheless be conveniently summarized.
You want smoking guns? Here they are, starting with the evidence that John F. Kerry, and not George W. Bush, won the state of Ohio.
1. Uncounted punch-card and provisional ballots.
Well over 13,000 Ohio provisional ballots were never counted, and 92,672 regular punch-card ballots were set aside by vote-counting machines as indicating no choice for president. Thus, even after Ohio's supposed recount, a total of over 106,000 ballots remained uncounted--though there was "no legal reason for not inspecting and counting each of these ballots."[34] But there seems to have been a very good political reason for not doing so: the uncounted ballots came disproportionately from places like the cities of Cincinnati, Cleveland and Akron, all of which voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats.
2. Fraud through default settings on touch-screen voting machines.
Some 15 percent of Ohio's votes were cast using the new touch-screen voting machines. In the city of Youngstown, in Mahoning County, there were repeated complaints about what election observers referred to as "vote flipping" by the ES&S Ivotronic touch-screen machines used there. This "flipping" phenomenon, also widely observed in other states, typically appeared to poll watchers "like a mere computer glitch, no different than a super market checkout machine that records an incorrect price for lettuce."[35]
But what was happening, in the vast majority of cases, was no "glitch." As Dom Stasi notes, "The laws of probability demand that multiple random errors trend toward even distribution, but only if they are truly errors."[36] Yet in all of the published accounts of vote flipping, the "errors" consistently favoured Bush: voters who were trying to vote for Kerry found their votes being given to Bush, transferred to third-party candidates, or simply erased.[37]
The Chairman of the Mahoning County Board of Elections is reported to have stated that "20 to 30 machines [...] needed to be recalibrated during the voting process."[38] He is not quoted as saying that any action was taken, or could be taken, to compensate for the machines' one-way errors--and there is evidence that many other machines were left uncorrected.
It is clearly not the case, as one Youngstown poll worker claimed, that the repeated anomalies were due to the machines being "temperamental." A supermarket checkout machine doesn't charge ten dollars for a tin of sardines because it's having a bad hair day: it does so because that's what it has been (perhaps mistakenly) programmed to charge.
Similarly, ES&S machines flipped votes from Kerry to Bush because, as Richard Hayes Phillips proposes, they had been given "preselected default settings" that made them do so. And if they flipped votes in an apparently "temperamental" manner, 'acting up' only for every fourth or fifth or tenth voter, that would be a sign, not of electronic hissy fits, but of their having been programmed to move at preset intervals to the default setting.
One of the six machines in Youngstown's precinct 5G appears to have had a default setting for no vote at all. It may have been single-handedly responsible for the fact that nearly 14 percent of the ballots cast in this precinct (where the votes were running in Kerry's favour in a ratio of 12 to 1) were "undervotes," that is, votes cast with no preference for president.[39]
Elsewhere, the subtler effect of many machines moving at intervals to their default settings would have been a gently tidal lifting of the Republican vote tallies by thousands of stolen votes.[40]
3. 'Ghost' absentee voters in Trumbull County.
What appears to be a similar effect of widely diffused fraud came to light in Trumbull County when Dr. Werner Lange undertook the labour of inspecting 106 of the county's precinct poll books. Among the absentee votes listed in these books he found a total of 580 apparent 'ghost' votes--that is, "absentee votes for which there were no absentee voters identified." In other words, there were on average 5.5 faked absentee votes in each of the precinct books he checked. The number may not seem significant, but this level of faked absentee votes, if it turned out to have been reproduced across the state of Ohio, would have resulted in a total of over 62,000 faked votes.[41]
Just how widespread this particular form of cheating was we may never know, since it appears that in many counties the electoral data is now being destroyed.
Lange's evidence has been challenged by Russ Baker, who in a study financed by "the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute" describes himself as "an old-style investigative reporter." The 'investigation' in this instance didn't go beyond accepting the explanation of a Trumbull County official "that the poll books Lange looked at had been printed before absentee voting ended--including those who voted in the final days before the election at the Board's offices. The books would--according to practice--be updated to include everyone."[42]
But the investigator, bless his gum shoes, seems not to have understood what is at issue. Lange writes that his study "would have been completed weeks earlier if Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell [...] had not unlawfully ordered all 88 boards of elections to prevent public inspection of poll books until after the certification of the vote." In other words, much if not all of his inspection of poll books was carried out after the official certification of the Ohio vote on December 6th--and thus more than a month after election day. When, if not at the time their votes were recorded, does Baker imagine that the identities of absentee voters would be recorded in the poll books?
4. Implausible voter turnout figures.
In Franklin County, which includes the city of Columbus, voter turnout figures in the 125 precincts won by Bush were on average nearly 10 percent higher than in the 346 precincts won by Kerry: the median turnout in Bush precincts was 60.56 percent; in Kerry precincts it was 50.78 percent.[43] Though the wide turnout differences here and in Ohio's other largely urban counties may be ascribed in large part to Kenneth Blackwell's vote-suppression tactics, including the partisan misallocation of voting machines, they have also raised suspicions that large numbers of Kerry votes went unrecorded.
These suspicions are strengthened by the certified reports from pro-Kerry Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County, of precincts with turnouts of as few as 22.31 percent (precinct 6B), 21.43 percent (13O), 20.07 percent (13F), 14.59 percent (13D), and 7.85 percent (6C) of the registered voters.[44] Thousands of people in these precincts lined up for many hours in the rain in order, it would appear, not to vote.
Meanwhile, in pro-Bush Perry County, the voting records certified by Secretary of State Blackwell included two precincts with reported turnouts of 124.4 and 124.0 percent of the registered voters, while in pro-Bush Miami County, there were precincts whose certified turnouts, if not physically impossible, were only slightly less improbable.[45] These and other instances of implausibly high turnouts in precincts won by Bush, and implausibly low turnouts in precincts won by Kerry, are strongly suggestive of widespread tampering with the vote-tabulation processes.
Similarly anomalous patterns of differences in voter turnout have been detected by Richard Hayes Phillips in Lucas County, which includes the city of Toledo. In this case, the story has a piquant twist: thieves broke into Lucas County Democratic Headquarters on the night of October 12th, and stole computers containing all of the party's local organizing and get-out-the-vote plans. It comes as no surprise that vote-tabulation manipulations in Toledo--and election-day vote-suppression efforts as well--appear to have been particularly well-focused.[46]
5. Vote-tabulation fraud in Miami County.
The fact that Miami County reported two successive sets of returns on election night attracted suspicion from the start. The county's initial figures, with 100 percent of the precincts reporting, seemed improbably low, with 31,620 votes cast--only about three-quarters as many as in the 2000 election. But the second total, when it came in late on election night, seemed improbably high--50,235 votes cast altogether--as well as being peculiarly tidy in two respects: John Kerry's share of the vote remained, to one-hundredth of one percent, exactly what it had been in the first set of returns (33.92 percent); and George W. Bush was shown to have won the county by exactly 16,000 votes.
The final certified figures (which include 1,542 provisional ballots added to the total) provided further surprises. In a county whose population had increased by only 1.38 percent since 2000, the number of votes cast rose by a whopping 20.86 percent. Bush's margin of victory over Kerry in the county was larger by 7.3 percent than his margin of victory over Gore had been in 2000, meaning either that the county swung strongly in Bush's favour, or else that he succeeded in capturing an overwhelming proportion--well over 90 percent--of the nearly 9,000 additional voters.
A third possibility also presents itself: namely, that a substantial number of the people who voted for George Bush in Miami County in 2004 do not in fact exist.
Richard Hayes Phillips proposes that the Miami County returns are riddled with fraud--sometimes rather sloppy fraud, as when the precincts of Concord South and Concord South West reported voter turnouts of 94.27 and 98.55 percent respectively, while in adjoining Concord South East the turnout amounted to only 56.55 percent of registered voters.[47] (The Concord South West turnout figure means, by the way, that only ten registered voters failed to vote--though more than that number of voters in the precinct have signed affidavits testifying that they did not vote.)[48]
6. Vote-tabulation fraud in Warren, Butler, Clermont (and other) Counties.
There is strong evidence of large-scale vote-tabulation fraud in these three contiguous and traditionally Republican counties in southwestern Ohio. The comparisons between the 2000 and 2004 figures that Richard Hayes Phillips provides are instructive.
In Warren County, the population increased by 14.75%, the number of registered voters increased by 29.66%, voter turnout increased by 33.55%, Bush's point spread increased from 42.24% to 44.58%, and Bush's victory margin increased from 29,176 votes to 41,124 votes.
In Clermont County[...], the population increased by 4.39%, the number of registered voters increased by 10.20%, voter turnout increased by 24.86%, Bush's point spread increased from 37.50% to 41.69%, and Bush's victory margin increased from 26,202 votes to 36,376 votes.
In Butler County[...], the population increased by 3.12%, the number of registered voters increased by 10.06%, voter turnout increased by 18.18%, Bush's point spread increased from 29.40% to 32.52%, and Bush's victory margin increased from 40,197 votes to 52,550 votes.[49]
These figures are vehemently to be suspected, not least because of the election-night "lock-down" of the Warren County administrative building--an event which may suggest that the team responsible for ensuring that Bush's Ohio vote tallies added up to a convincing victory was at work behind those locked doors, and didn't want their earnest meditations to be disturbed by election observers, journalists, or 'terrorists' of any kind.
At the precinct level, dubious figures throughout these three counties cry out for detailed investigation.
For example, in Butler County's St. Clair Township, where voter turnout rose by 8.27 percent, Kerry received exactly 10.00 percent fewer votes than Gore had in 2000; while in two precincts of Liberty Township (which accounted for a quarter of the purported increase in Bush's margin of victory in Butler County, the numbers of registered voters are said to have risen since 2000 from 660 to 1,834 (an increase of 177.9 percent) and from 596 to 1,451 (an increase of 143.5 percent).
A more distinct marker of fraud is the fact that in all three counties C. Ellen Connally, a comparatively little-known African-American municipal judge from Cleveland who was running as a Democrat for the position of Chief Justice against a well-funded Republican incumbent, Thomas Moyer, received significantly more votes than did the Kerry-Edwards ticket--in Butler County, 5,347 more, and in Clermont County, 4,146 more votes. As Congressman John Conyers and his colleagues emphasized in their letter of December 2nd to Secretary of State Blackwell, this is a bizarre anomaly:
"Have you examined how an underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate could receive so many more votes in Butler County than the Kerry-Edwards ticket? If so, could you provide us with the results of your examination? Is there any precedent in Ohio for a downballot candidate receiving on a percentage or absolute basis so many more votes than the presidential candidate of the same party in this or any other presidential election? Please let us know if any other County in Ohio registered such a disparity on a percentage or absolute basis."[50]
Blackwell, needless to say, did not respond to these questions. But as Conyers and his researchers went on to discover for themselves, the obscure Judge Connally did in fact out-poll the Democratic presidential candidate in seven other Ohio counties: Auglaize, Brown, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, and Putnam Counties.[51]
If this "disparity" of Connally out-polling Kerry is a sign that Kerry votes were being discarded or switched to Bush through vote-tabulation fraud in Butler, Clermont and Warren Counties, then it is also a marker of electoral fraud in these other counties as well.
7. Doing the sums: one analyst's estimate.
After conducting precinct-by-precinct analyses of statistical anomalies in the election results "in fifteen Ohio counties accounting for 62% of the registered voters in the state," Richard Hayes Phillips determined that, on a conservative estimate, "the reported margin of victory for George W. Bush in the State of Ohio is inflated by 101,020 votes." This estimate, in addition to being conservative, is also incomplete.
Phillips remarks that "These studies were conducted under time constraints and with such evidence as Ohio officials were willing to provide.
Even in the counties that I have analyzed, I have examined only certain aspects of a well-orchestrated and multi-faceted plan to undermine democracy in Ohio." Emphasizing, in conclusion, that he has yet to analyze the data from seventy-three of Ohio's eighty-eight counties, Phillips implies that the manifold forms of electoral fraud and vote suppression identified were sufficient to divert to Bush what would have been, in a clean election, a clear Kerry victory.[52]
8. Cuyahoga County: other kinds of fraud.
In moving on to evidence beyond that which Richard Hayes Phillips took into account, I need first to explain one very large-scale false alarm. The election results published by Cuyahoga County (which includes the city of Cleveland) led a number of commentators in November 2004--myself among them--to believe that there had been massive 'ghost-voting' fraud in the suburbs of Cleveland.[53]
But the official lists showing twenty-nine communities with voter turnout figures of more than 100 percent (and hence some 93,000 'ghost votes' in the county) turned out to result from a bizarrely structured software program that grouped communities in the same congressional, house and state senate districts, and added the total number of absentee ballots within the combined districts to the voter turnout figures for each community in these districts-though not to the vote totals for candidates or issues.[54]
This programming oddity worked, the County's website idiotically declared, in "even-numbered years." What its intended function might have been is hard to say. It could have been a piece of innocent stupidity, or the residue of an abandoned ghost-voting scheme--or even a Karl Rovian fool-catcher, designed to set the blogosphere alight with easily extinguished flames.
But other, more subtle, forms of electoral corruption now appear to have been detected in the Cuyahoga County returns.
As may have been observed, the statistically-informed analyses of Richard Hayes Phillips are open to the objection that some of his judgments are, in the end, no more than subjective.
Many of the anomalies he swings at are, without question, home-run pitches: the voter turnout figures in Concord, Miami County, for example, amount to a fast ball over the plate that Phillips hits over the back fence.
In other instances, as in Warren County and the adjoining counties of southwestern Ohio, his analyses are corroborated by evidence like the Judge Connally disparity. There may be further cases, though, in which a skeptical reader might well ask for firmer evidence of fraud than one analyst's "professional judgment." Two recently published studies of the Cuyahoga County data appear to offer methods of analysis that could be usefully applied to the election returns from other Ohio counties--and, quite possibly, from other states as well.
The first establishes the likelihood that what observers thought to be mere incompetence in the conduct of the election in Cleveland was actually a deliberately designed feature intended to throw large numbers of votes from Kerry to Bush; the second, if its "reverse-engineering" programming analysis can be confirmed, would show that a significant number of the official precinct vote-tallies in this county--and perhaps in many others--were fraudulently generated by a hacker.
James Q. Jacobs' still ongoing work with the Cuyahoga County data reveals a significant connection between two apparently disparate features of the election: the fact that odd and wholly implausible clumps of votes in certain precincts went to third-party candidates in a manner that some observers have thought must point to computer hacking; and the fact, noted with frustration by many voters and election-day observers, that in many instances the same polling place was used for two or more voting precincts, and that because of inadequate or nonexistent precinct labeling, significant numbers of voters found themselves in the wrong line-ups.
Jacobs demonstrates a connection between the two: the anomalous third-party votes arose from the fact that the punch-card ballots given to voters in adjoining precincts listed the presidential candidates in different sequences. What he calls "precinct cross-voting" led to many ballots being counted by machines that were coded to attribute punch-marks in a manner differing from the printed sequence of candidates' names on the ballots.
As Jacobs' detailed and statistically sophisticated analysis shows, the result was a steady diversion of votes from Kerry, the candidate favoured by an overwhelming majority of Cleveland voters, to Bush and to third-party candidates.[55] What at first seems no more than spectacularly incompetent election design appears, on reflection, more likely to have been intended to produce exactly this effect.
But if the clumps of third-party votes seem not to have been the result of hackers moving votes about and leaving some of them parked with third-party candidates, that doesn't mean that hacking was not taking place.
Another analysis that may have wide potential applicability has been published at the Democratic Underground website by a computer programmer who claims to have special expertise in the reverse-engineering of calculations, and who goes by the blogger cognomen of '59sunburst.' (Because this analysis has been anonymously published--and because, moreover, I have been unable to activate the author's link to a field of supporting data--I present it with due reservations, in the hope that those possessing programming expertise may be able to critically assess its validity.)
Finding it curious that in 46 Cuyahoga County precincts George Bush received the same number of votes in 2004 as in 2000, while only in 12 precincts did John Kerry receive the same number of votes that Al Gore did in 2000, '59sunburst' speculated that Bush's 2000 numbers in each precinct might somehow have been used "as a benchmark for altering the results of 2004"--with a putative hacker's goal being to ensure that Bush's 2000 level of support was either maintained or enhanced. '59sunburst' was able to develop a quite simple mathematical formula which made it possible "to calculate Kerry's and Bush's 2004 totals for over 400 precincts using Bush's 2000 numbers and a randomizing factor"; this formula, s/he claims, works both for the preliminary results published on November 8th and the final results published by Cuyahoga County's Board of Elections on November 30th.
After demonstrating, with figures from Cleveland precinct 1M, how the formula generates Bush's and Kerry's 2004 vote tallies for both the November 8th and the November 30th reports out of the Bush 2000 vote count and the number of votes cast in 2004, '59sunburst' anticipates the obvious objection: If you throw the right randomizing factor into such a calculation, "you can make anything come out the way you want it to."
True--but it appears that someone was indeed making things come out the way he wanted to on election night. For, as it happens, Cleveland precinct 1N--the very next one on the list--requires the very same "randomizing factor" as precinct 1M (Factor: 0.0618) for the formula to work. The same phenomenon recurs repeatedly with other pairs (or triplets) of consecutively listed precincts: Cleveland 6G and 6H (Factor: 0.005), Cleveland 10D and 10E (Factor: 0.024), Cleveland Heights 3C and 3D (Factor: 0.0267), East Cleveland 2E and 2F (Factor: 0.0263), East Cleveland 2H and 3A (Factor: 0.0241), East Cleveland 3B, 3C, and 3D (Factor: 0.0158), and so on.[56]
If the "randomizing factor" numbers were different in each precinct, or only randomly coincided, there would be no reason to suspect a hacker's presence. What gives the game away is the reappearance of the same numbers in successive precincts--an obvious economizing of effort on the part of a hacker whose sticky fingerprints on the Cuyahoga County returns are made visible by that very fact. The effects of this hacking appear to have been substantial: in the first pair of precincts discussed by '59sunburst' alone, Bush's tally rose from 2 votes in 2000 to 23 in 2004 (precinct 1M), and from 2 votes in 2000 to 32 in 2004 (precinct 1N).
8. The Ohio exit poll.
The November 2nd exit poll showed with some clarity the scale of the Republican Party's electoral fraud in Ohio. When I gathered the Ohio exit poll data from CNN's website at 7:32 p.m. EST on election day, women voters (53 percent of the total) were reported as favouring Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 47 percent, while male voters (47 percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 51 percent to 49 percent. The exit poll thus showed Kerry winning Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percent, with 52.1 percent of the vote to Bush's 47.9 percent.[57]
According to the official vote tally, however, George W. Bush carried Ohio with 51 percent of the vote to John Kerry's 48.5 percent--with a winning margin, that is, of 2.5 percent. (Subsequent adjustments to the tally as absentee and provisional ballots were counted cut the margin of victory from 2.5 to 2 percent.)
But do exit polls mean anything at all? According to the collective wisdom of political pundits in the U.S. corporate media, the Ohio exit poll--like the national exit poll, which showed John Kerry, not George W. Bush, winning the popular vote nationwide by a margin of 2.56 percent[58]--must simply have been wrong. Set aside the fact that professionally conducted exit polls have been repeatedly shown to have a high degree of accuracy (significantly higher than that of any other kind of polling).
Set aside the fact that the 2004 polls were conducted with elaborate professional care by one of the most highly respected pollsters in the business. Set aside as well the very peculiar fact that all of the divergences between exit polls and vote tallies in the swing states in the 2004 election favoured George W. Bush--often by amounts far outside the statistical margins of error--and the further fact that none of the (frankly implausible) explanations put forward to deal with this statistical anomaly have been supported by the smallest shred of evidence.[59]
Perhaps we should also avoid any mention of the high-toned denunciations of electoral fraud delivered by George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Republican Senators Richard Lugar and John McCain following the second-round presidential election in Ukraine on November 21st, 2004. For what was the key evidence adduced in this chorus of denunciations? And why were these Republican statesmen threatening Ukraine with diplomatic isolation and economic penalties if the election results were allowed to stand? Because there was a wide divergence in Ukraine between the exit polls, which gave Viktor Yushchenko a commanding lead, and the official vote tally, according to which the election was narrowly won by his pro-Russian rival, Viktor Yanukovich.
Those who have not yet wholly averted their eyes from the matter might want to note that the divergence between the second-round vote tally in Ukraine and what seems to be the more trustworthy of the second-round Ukrainian exit polls was 6.2 percent.[60] By an odd coincidence, the divergence between the exit poll result and the final vote tally in Ohio was exactly the same: 6.2 percent.
If George W. Bush didn't win the vote tally in Ohio--and the evidence that he didn't is cumulatively overwhelming--then he didn't properly win the Electoral College vote either.
And the popular vote? For the sake of completeness, and of decency, let's briefly lay to rest the idea that some tattered shreds of democratic legitimacy can be reclaimed for Bush's presidency through the pretense that he must, after all, have won the popular vote on November 2nd.
I am not going to rehearse here any part of the rapidly accumulating body of analyses that shows Republican electoral fraud to have been carried out in many other states from coast to coast with much the same energy and inventiveness as in Ohio.[61] For as the mathematician who posts his analyses of exit poll data at the Democratic Underground site under the name 'TruthIsAll' has intimated, and as Dr. Steven F. Freeman has shown in a major new study which he has kindly shared with me in draft form, there is a simpler way of showing that, in the big picture, the numbers which underlie Bush's supposed victory in the popular vote simply don't add up.[62]
In comparison to the election of 2000, there were two dramatic changes in 2004: an increase of some 14 percent in the total number of votes cast (which rose from 105,405,000 in 2000 to 120,255,000 in 2004), and a significant decline in the proportion of votes cast for third-party candidates (which sank from 3,949,000 in 2000 to 1,170,000 in 2004). According to the national exit poll data made available by CNN on the evening of November 2nd, 83 percent of those who voted in 2004 had also voted in 2000. This means, in slightly different terms, that nearly 100 million people who voted in 2000, or close to 95 percent of the 2000 voters, also cast ballots in 2004.[63] In the 2004 exit poll, 13,047 randomly selected respondents stated that they had voted as follows:
Bush Kerry
Gore 2000 voters: 8% 91%
Bush 2000 voters: 90% 10%
Other 2000 voters: 17% 64%
New voters: 41% 57%
Al Gore, remember, won the popular vote in 2000 by almost 544,000 votes (50,999,897 votes to George Bush's 50,456,002). Assuming that the 8 percent of Gore voters who migrated to Bush's camp in 2004 more or less cancel out the 10 percent of Bush-2000 voters who swung to Kerry, one can take the base number of supporters for Bush and Kerry in 2004 as amounting to 95 percent of the Republican and Democratic presidential vote tallies in 2000--or, in round numbers, 48.4 million votes for Kerry and 47.9 million votes for Bush.
If 95 percent of the 3,949,000 who voted for third-party candidates in 2000 also voted in 2004, then given that 64 percent of these people voted for Kerry and 17 percent for Bush, that, in round numbers, would add 2.3 million votes to Kerry's expected total and 600,000 to Bush's, raising them to 50.7 million for Kerry and 48.5 million for Bush.
Add in the 20.2 million new voters, 57 percent of whose ballots, according to the exit poll, went to Kerry, and 41 percent to Bush. That means 11.5 million additional votes for Kerry, and 8.3 million additional votes for Bush. The final expected total comes out to 62.2 million votes for Kerry, and 56.8 million expected votes for Bush.
Compare these numbers to the official results: 61,194,773 votes (or 51 percent of the total votes cast) for George W. Bush, and 57,890,314 (or 48 percent) for John Kerry. The discrepancies are striking: Bush appears to have received 4.4 million more votes than he should have, and Kerry 4.3 million fewer than he should have.
The magic--as Congressman Peter King, whom I quoted at the outset, evidently understood--is in the counting. As a large and growing body of evidence makes clear, the official tallies of the 2004 presidential election are to an unprecedented degree distorted by fraud, much of it carried out through widespread and systematic tampering with electronic vote-tabulation machines.
There is, of course, another magic as well, whose secrets reside in all the manifold ways of not counting. In December 2000, Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, a leading expert in issues of electronic voting-technology security, together with Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, estimated that at least two million of the ballots cast in that year's presidential election never got counted. In the words of the journalists who reported this estimate: "That would disenfranchise a city the size of Houston."[64] How large a city has been disenfranchised this time round, if in Ohio alone 106,000 ballots went uncounted?
And finally, there is the shabbiest magic of all--the magic of the corporate-media hacks and think-tank trolls, whose collective mission it is to conjure away the most glaring evidence, normalize the abnormal, and twist or bludgeon critical thinking into conformity.
What this adds up to, I have suggested in my title, is the death of American democracy. A strange death, because so many Americans, for good reasons and for bad, refuse to acknowledge that it has taken place.
The good reasons--those of the many thousand pro-democracy activists who remain fiercely attached to the rights and freedoms that are theirs by inheritance and struggle, who have uncovered through patient study the details of the theft, and who are seeking through firm public action to reassert the dignity and reclaim the stolen voices of those many hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens deliberately abjected and silenced by fraud--these one must honour. One can honour as well the activists' wit and their defiant good humour--evident, for example, in the placards carried in a demonstration in Denver on November 11th (Remembrance Day, in this country):
"Dude, Where Did My Vote Go?"
"Vote Free or Die Bold"
"Correct Electile Dysfunction"
"Corporations Cannot Run Elections"
"The Computer Ate My Vote!"
"The Fox is Guarding the Voting Coop"
"I Do Not Concede."[65]
But let's be realistic about what it means when, with the willing complicity of all the major outlets of the corporate media, a single corporatist party controls the executive functions of the central government, including all of the security apparatus of a thoroughly militarized state, both houses of the legislature, and the judiciary--and what it means when this same party, having acquired executive power in 2000 through electoral fraud and a judicial coup d'état, and having confirmed its control of the legislature through the corrupt midterm elections of 2002, then provides a convincing demonstration in 2004 of its power to turn what should have been a landslide electoral defeat into a dubious but effectively unassailable victory.
It might be suggested that the leader himself, in his inverted Orwellian manner, gave fair warning of what the public could anticipate in his second presidential election. One of the most rightly celebrated of all 'Bushisms' was delivered in September 2002 to an audience in Nashville, Tennessee: "There's an old saying in Tennessee--I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee--that says, fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again."[66] Really? Why on earth not?
For now at least, the forms of a democratic republic remain in place--as, in a parallel way, the residual forms of the Roman Republic remained in place well after its devolution into a militarized imperial autocracy.
One of the early emperors, Tiberius, got sadistic pleasure out of writing deferential letters to the Roman Senate, humbly requesting the terrorized senators' direction and advice. (It is not recorded, though others of his missives had a similarly noxious effect, that he ever went so far as to have the envelopes dusted--did the Romans use envelopes?--with weaponized anthrax.)[67]
Tiberius's successor, known to history by the fond nickname, Caligula, given him by the Roman legionaries, likewise held the Senate in high esteem: he is said to have planned to have his horse--or was it his donkey?--elected to that august body.[68]
Notes
1 For writings by these and other critics of electronic voting technologies, see Michael Keefer, "Evidence of Fraud in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Reader," Centre for Research on Globalization (5 December 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE412A.html
2 For an incisive analysis of the Bin Laden tape, see Michel Chossudovsky, "'Intelligence Asset' bin Laden supports Bush Re-election," Centre for Research on Globalization (31 October 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO410B.html
3 King's remarks, recorded in Alex Pelosi's new film Diary of a Political Tourist, are quoted by Thom Hartmann in "Restoring Trust in the Vote," Common Dreams News Center (15 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1115-htm
4 J. Kenneth Blackwell, "How Ohio pulled it off," The Washington Times (17 November 2004), http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20041116-085742-1497r.htm
5 "Blackwell Compares Gay Couples, Farm Animals," WTOL11: Toledo's News Leader (20 October 2004), http://www.wtol.com/global/story.asp?s=2457596
6 See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XIX.
7 Gregory Korte and Jim Siegel, "Defiant Blackwell Rips Judge," Cincinnati Enquirer (22 October 2004), http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/22/loc_blackwell22.html
8 For further details see Blackwell's website, http://www.sos.oh.us/sos/occc/index.html
9 Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, "Ohio GOP election officials ducking subpoenas as Kerry enters stolen vote fray," The Free Press (28 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1046
10 For evidence of the practice of purging voter rolls, see Greg Palast, "Electoral Fraud, Ethnic Cleansing of Voter Rolls, An Election Spoiled Rotten," TomPaine.com (1 November 2004), available at http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/PAL411A.html , and Greg Moses, "The One-Two Punch of Racism: Whitewashing the Voter Fraud Issue," The Free Press (10 December 2004),
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/977 .
This and other forms of Jim Crow electoral manipulation are analyzed in a report by the Democratic Investigative Staff, House Committee on the Judiciary, How to Make One Million Votes Disappear: Electoral Sleight of Hand in the 2000 Presidential Election. A Fifty-State Report Prepared for Rep. John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Member, House Committee on the Judiciary (Washington, D.C.: U.S. House of Representatives, 20 August 2001, available at http://www.electionreport.pdf ).
Substantial evidence of the Ohio Republican Party's illegal practice of "caging" (sending registered letters to newly registered minority and urban voters, and then challenging those whose letters are returned as undeliverable--often because they refuse to sign for mail from the Republicans) is presented in the Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio (Washington, D.C.: U.S. House of Representatives, 5 January 2005, available at http://www.house.gov/conyers ), pp. 40-43. I would recommend analysis of the following Cleveland precincts, where the astonishingly low numbers of registered voters in the Cuyahoga County electoral returns creates suspicion of purging: 5U (30 registered voters), 6E (21 voters), 6X (83 voters), 13Y (56 voters), 13Z (53 voters), 14C (13 voters), 14D (7 voters), 16C (51 voters), 18B (58 voters), and 19A (19 voters).
11 David S. Bernstein, "Questioning Ohio: No controversy this time? Think again," The Boston Phoenix (12-18 November 2004), http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/04256171.asp
12 Free Press Staff, "Franklin County, Ohio voting machine assignments, and other information," The Free Press (20 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/900 ; Bob Fitrakis, "How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush," The Free Press (22 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995 ; Richard Hayes Phillips, "Stealing votes in Columbus," The Free Press (23 November 2004), http://www/freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/914 Phillips, "Another Stolen Election: Favoritism in the Suburbs," Lyric Poetry Website (26 November 2004), http://web.northnet.org/minstrel/suburbs.htm
13 See Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings A.5: "Targeting Minority and Urban Voters for Legal Challenges," pp. 43-47; and Richard Hayes Phillips, "Provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County," The Free Press (24 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1034
14 Phillips, "Default settings in Mahoning County," The Free Press (23 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1018
15 See Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings B.3.a: "Spoiled Ballots--Hanging Chads Again?", pp. 70-72; and Richard Hayes Phillips, "Uncounted votes in Montgomery County," The Free Press (10 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/980 ; "Uncounted votes in Hamilton County," The Free Press (24 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1036; and "Uncounted votes in Summit County," The Free Press (24 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1035
16 Erica Solvig, "Warren's vote tally walled off: Alone in Ohio, officials cited homeland security," Cincinnati Enquirer (5 November 2004), http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.html ; Solvig, "No changes in final Warren Co. vote count, Emails released Monday show lockdown pre-planned," Cincinnati Enquirer (16 November 2004), http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041116/NEWS01/411160355/1056/news01
17 Richard Hayes Phillips, "Election results in southwestern Ohio," The Free Press (21 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1012 ; Phillips, "Hacking the vote in Miami County," The Free Press (25 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1038
18 Registration and vote tally irregularities in Perry County were noted by Congressional Representative John Conyers in a letter to Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell dated 2 December 2004, available at http://www.house.gov/conyers ; many further irregularities are itemized in Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings B: Election Day.
19 See Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings C.2: "Justice Delayed is Justice Denied--Recounts were Delayed Because of a Late Declaration of Results," pp. 79-81.
20 See "The Case for Fraud in Ohio Election 2004 (V.B: Restricting Citizen Access to Election Records)," Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, http://www.bpac.info
21 Ray Beckerman, "Blackwell Locks Down Ohio Voting Records," Yurica Report: News Intelligence Analysis (10 December 2004), http://www.yuricareport.com/2004%20Election%20Fraud/BlackwellLocksDownOhioVotingRecords.html
22 Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings C.4: "Greene County--Long Waits, the Unlocked Lockdown, and Discarded Ballots," pp. 87-91.
23 According to Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings, C.5.a: "Irregularities in Selecting the Initial 3% Hand Count," pp. 92-93, the samples were not selected randomly in Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Medina and Vinton Counties; in Summit County the selection was random, but conducted without any recount witnesses present. According to a lawsuit filed on December 30th by the Green and Libertarian parties, the selection of sample precincts was non-random in 17 counties (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._presidential_election_controversy_and_irregularities ). David Swanson claims, in "The Media and the Ohio Recount: Missing in Action," Counterpunch (3 January 2005), http://www.counterpunch.org/swanson01032005.html , that "86 of 88 counties broke the law and did not select RANDOMLY which precincts they would recount."
24 William Rivers Pitt, "Proof of Ohio Election Fraud Exposed," Truthout (15 December 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121604Z.shtml ; this item reprints other texts, including a key affidavit and Tom Zeller's article "Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry into Ohio Vote," The New York Times (15 December 2004). Further details of Triad's alleged tampering are available in two letters from Congressional Representative John Conyers to Triad officials, available at http://www.house.gov/conyers , and also in Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings, C.3: "Triad GSI--Using a 'Cheat Sheet to Cheat the Voters in Hocking and Other Counties," pp. 81-87. The December 30th lawsuit filed by the Green and Libertarian parties lists five counties in which tabulating-machine tampering was carried out by Triad, and one in which the tampering was carried out by a Diebold technician.
25 The December 30th lawsuit filed by the Green and Libertarian parties lists six counties in which, despite sample-recount discrepancies, the Board of Elections refused to conduct full recounts. Two flagrant cases of impropriety in the recount are narrated in Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, C.5.b: "Irregularities in Applying the Full Hand-Count Requirement":
"In Monroe County, the 3% hand-count failed to match the machine count twice. Subsequent runs on that machine matched neither each other nor the hand count. The Monroe County Board of Elections summoned a repairman from Triad to bring a new machine and the recount was suspended and reconvened for the following day. On the following day, a new machine was present at the Board of Elections office and the old machine was gone. The Board conducted a test run followed by the 3% hand-counted ballots. The results matched this time and the Board conducted the remainder of the recount by machine."
"In Fairfield County, the hand recount of the 3% test sample did not match the machine count, even after two attempts. The Board suspended the recount and stated that Secretary Blackwell recommended that the recount should begin again 'from scratch.' The Green recount observers were then told that it was 4:00 PM, the building was closed, and all had to leave. The Republican recount observers, however, were allowed to stay in a conference room for an additional ten minutes or so for a private discussion. When the Board reconvened a few days later, it announced that it would be conducting a machine count of the county's votes. When a Green Party observer objected, she was told by the Board that she was not allowed to speak."
26 Swanson, "The Media and the Ohio Recount."
27 "Text of Fundraising Letter from Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell," available as an appendix to Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, "The 'Crime of November 2': The human side of how Bush stole Ohio, and why Congress must investigate rather than ratify the Electoral College (Part Two of Two)," The Free Press (5 January 2005), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1067
28 Melvin Butch Hollowell and Len Niehoff, "Local Comment: To even consider suppressing the vote shames a democracy," Detroit Free Press (27 July 2004), http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/eholl27_20040727.htm . For a mainstream account of election-day vote suppression in Ohio, see Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," The Washington Post (15 December 2004): A1, available at Yurica Report: News Intelligence Analysis, http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/Factors%20ContributedToLostVotersInOhio.html . For a very useful listing of materials relating to vote suppression and electoral fraud, see Election 2004, http://shadowbox.i8.com/stolen.htm
29 Fitrakis, Rosenfeld, and Wassermann, "Ohio's official recount ends amidst new evidence of fraud, theft and judicial contempt mirrored in New Mexico," The Free Press (31 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1057
30 "Contesting Ohio Electoral Votes: Transcript of Press Conference: Senator Barbara Boxer and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones," Federal News Service (6 January 2005), available from the Centre for Research on Globalization (9 January 2005), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BOX501A.html
31 Mark Weisbrot, "Ohio Election Problems Highlight Urgent Need for Reform," Knight Ridder Newspapers (8 January 2005), available at Common Dreams News Center (9 January 2005), http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0108-26.htm
32 Quotations are from Brian Dominick and Ariella Cohen, "Electoral Vote Challenge Meets Venomous Response in Congress," The New Standard (8 January 2005), available at Znet, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=6979 ; Alan Fram, "Congress Formally OKs Bush Election," Yahoo! News (6 January 2005), http://www.story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&c=5&u=/ap/20050106/ap_on_go_co/electoral_vote ; from "History in the Making: Dems Force Debate on Ohio Voting Irregularities," Democracy Now! (7 January 2005), http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/07/1621240 ; and the C-Span broadcast of the House debate, available at rtsp://video.c-span.org/60days/wh010605_house.rm
33 That Gore would have won is clear: see Robert Parry, "So Bush Did Steal the White House," Consortium News (22 November 2001), http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/112101a.html ; the figure of 23,000 votes is from Daniel Lazare, The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, The Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 4.
34 Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, "Ten preliminary reasons why the Bush vote does not compute...," The Free Press (3 January 2005), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1065
35 Robert Lockwood Mills, "The greatest story never told," The Free Press (20 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1006
36 Dom Stasi, "Moral victory: Religious exploitation, and the new American creed," Online Journal (23 December 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/122304Stasi/122304stasi.html
37 According to staff writers of The Nashua Advocate, over 97 percent of the vote-flipping incidents reported to the non-partisan Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) favoured Bush: see "News: Election 2004: Who's Reading the Words of 'Internet Muckrakers'? Diebold, For a Start...," The Nashua Advocate (14 January 2005), http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/2005/01/news-election-2004-whos-reading-words.html
38 Richard Hayes Phillips, "Default settings in Mahoning County," The Free Press (23 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1018
39 Phillips, "Default settings."
40 For evidence of the election-swinging potential of this form of fraud, see Anthony di Franco at al., "Small Vote Manipulations Can Swing Elections," Communications of the ACM 47: 10 (October 2004): 43-45, available at http://www.wheresthepaper.org/p43_di_franco.pdf
41 Dr. Werner Lange, "More Votes than Voters in Ohio: Absentee Vote Inflated, Certified Vote in Doubt," Democrats.com/unity (12 December 2004), http://democrats.com/ohio-absentee
42 Russ Baker, "Election 2004: Stolen or Lost," TomPaine.com (7 January 2005), http://www.tompaine.com/articles/election_2004_stolen_or_lost.php
43 Fitrakis, Rosenfeld and Wasserman, "Ten preliminary reasons."
44 These are the certified figures, from Cuyahoga County General Election: Official Results Report, which is no longer available on the web; the data can now be obtained from James Q. Jacobs’ website (see note 55 below). The figures first released after the election, before there had been a partial counting of provisional ballots, were still more shocking: 7.1 percent (Cleveland 6C), 13.05 percent (13D), 19.6 percent (13F), 21.01 percent (13O), and 21.8 percent (6B). Cleveland precinct 10L was initially reported as having a 24.72 percent turnout--a figure which rose in the certified results to a 56.21 percent turnout. Perhaps by some accident all of the provisional and absentee ballots cast in this precinct were counted.
45 Fitrakis, Rosenfeld and Wasserman, "Ten preliminary reasons."
11 David S. Bernstein, "Questioning Ohio: No controversy this time? Think again," The Boston Phoenix (12-18 November 2004), http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/04256171.asp
12 Free Press Staff, "Franklin County, Ohio voting machine assignments, and other information," The Free Press (20 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/900 ; Bob Fitrakis, "How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush," The Free Press (22 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995 ; Richard Hayes Phillips, "Stealing votes in Columbus," The Free Press (23 November 2004), http://www/freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/914 Phillips, "Another Stolen Election: Favoritism in the Suburbs," Lyric Poetry Website (26 November 2004), http://web.northnet.org/minstrel/suburbs.htm
13 See Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings A.5: "Targeting Minority and Urban Voters for Legal Challenges," pp. 43-47; and Richard Hayes Phillips, "Provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County," The Free Press (24 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1034
14 Phillips, "Default settings in Mahoning County," The Free Press (23 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1018
15 See Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings B.3.a: "Spoiled Ballots--Hanging Chads Again?", pp. 70-72; and Richard Hayes Phillips, "Uncounted votes in Montgomery County," The Free Press (10 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/980 ; "Uncounted votes in Hamilton County," The Free Press (24 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1036; and "Uncounted votes in Summit County," The Free Press (24 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1035
16 Erica Solvig, "Warren's vote tally walled off: Alone in Ohio, officials cited homeland security," Cincinnati Enquirer (5 November 2004), http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.html ; Solvig, "No changes in final Warren Co. vote count, Emails released Monday show lockdown pre-planned," Cincinnati Enquirer (16 November 2004), http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041116/NEWS01/411160355/1056/news01
17 Richard Hayes Phillips, "Election results in southwestern Ohio," The Free Press (21 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1012 ; Phillips, "Hacking the vote in Miami County," The Free Press (25 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1038
18 Registration and vote tally irregularities in Perry County were noted by Congressional Representative John Conyers in a letter to Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell dated 2 December 2004, available at http://www.house.gov/conyers ; many further irregularities are itemized in Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings B: Election Day.
19 See Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings C.2: "Justice Delayed is Justice Denied--Recounts were Delayed Because of a Late Declaration of Results," pp. 79-81.
20 See "The Case for Fraud in Ohio Election 2004 (V.B: Restricting Citizen Access to Election Records)," Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, http://www.bpac.info
21 Ray Beckerman, "Blackwell Locks Down Ohio Voting Records," Yurica Report: News Intelligence Analysis (10 December 2004), http://www.yuricareport.com/2004%20Election%20Fraud/BlackwellLocksDownOhioVotingRecords.html
22 Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings C.4: "Greene County--Long Waits, the Unlocked Lockdown, and Discarded Ballots," pp. 87-91.
23 According to Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings, C.5.a: "Irregularities in Selecting the Initial 3% Hand Count," pp. 92-93, the samples were not selected randomly in Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Medina and Vinton Counties; in Summit County the selection was random, but conducted without any recount witnesses present. According to a lawsuit filed on December 30th by the Green and Libertarian parties, the selection of sample precincts was non-random in 17 counties (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._presidential_election_controversy_and_irregularities ). David Swanson claims, in "The Media and the Ohio Recount: Missing in Action," Counterpunch (3 January 2005), http://www.counterpunch.org/swanson01032005.html , that "86 of 88 counties broke the law and did not select RANDOMLY which precincts they would recount."
24 William Rivers Pitt, "Proof of Ohio Election Fraud Exposed," Truthout (15 December 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121604Z.shtml ; this item reprints other texts, including a key affidavit and Tom Zeller's article "Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry into Ohio Vote," The New York Times (15 December 2004). Further details of Triad's alleged tampering are available in two letters from Congressional Representative John Conyers to Triad officials, available at http://www.house.gov/conyers , and also in Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Detailed Findings, C.3: "Triad GSI--Using a 'Cheat Sheet to Cheat the Voters in Hocking and Other Counties," pp. 81-87. The December 30th lawsuit filed by the Green and Libertarian parties lists five counties in which tabulating-machine tampering was carried out by Triad, and one in which the tampering was carried out by a Diebold technician.
25 The December 30th lawsuit filed by the Green and Libertarian parties lists six counties in which, despite sample-recount discrepancies, the Board of Elections refused to conduct full recounts. Two flagrant cases of impropriety in the recount are narrated in Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, C.5.b: "Irregularities in Applying the Full Hand-Count Requirement":
"In Monroe County, the 3% hand-count failed to match the machine count twice. Subsequent runs on that machine matched neither each other nor the hand count. The Monroe County Board of Elections summoned a repairman from Triad to bring a new machine and the recount was suspended and reconvened for the following day. On the following day, a new machine was present at the Board of Elections office and the old machine was gone. The Board conducted a test run followed by the 3% hand-counted ballots. The results matched this time and the Board conducted the remainder of the recount by machine."
"In Fairfield County, the hand recount of the 3% test sample did not match the machine count, even after two attempts. The Board suspended the recount and stated that Secretary Blackwell recommended that the recount should begin again 'from scratch.' The Green recount observers were then told that it was 4:00 PM, the building was closed, and all had to leave. The Republican recount observers, however, were allowed to stay in a conference room for an additional ten minutes or so for a private discussion. When the Board reconvened a few days later, it announced that it would be conducting a machine count of the county's votes. When a Green Party observer objected, she was told by the Board that she was not allowed to speak."
26 Swanson, "The Media and the Ohio Recount."
27 "Text of Fundraising Letter from Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell," available as an appendix to Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, "The 'Crime of November 2': The human side of how Bush stole Ohio, and why Congress must investigate rather than ratify the Electoral College (Part Two of Two)," The Free Press (5 January 2005), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1067
28 Melvin Butch Hollowell and Len Niehoff, "Local Comment: To even consider suppressing the vote shames a democracy," Detroit Free Press (27 July 2004), http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/eholl27_20040727.htm . For a mainstream account of election-day vote suppression in Ohio, see Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," The Washington Post (15 December 2004): A1, available at Yurica Report: News Intelligence Analysis, http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/Factors%20ContributedToLostVotersInOhio.html . For a very useful listing of materials relating to vote suppression and electoral fraud, see Election 2004, http://shadowbox.i8.com/stolen.htm
29 Fitrakis, Rosenfeld, and Wassermann, "Ohio's official recount ends amidst new evidence of fraud, theft and judicial contempt mirrored in New Mexico," The Free Press (31 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1057
30 "Contesting Ohio Electoral Votes: Transcript of Press Conference: Senator Barbara Boxer and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones," Federal News Service (6 January 2005), available from the Centre for Research on Globalization (9 January 2005), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BOX501A.html
31 Mark Weisbrot, "Ohio Election Problems Highlight Urgent Need for Reform," Knight Ridder Newspapers (8 January 2005), available at Common Dreams News Center (9 January 2005), http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0108-26.htm
32 Quotations are from Brian Dominick and Ariella Cohen, "Electoral Vote Challenge Meets Venomous Response in Congress," The New Standard (8 January 2005), available at Znet, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=6979 ; Alan Fram, "Congress Formally OKs Bush Election," Yahoo! News (6 January 2005), http://www.story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&c=5&u=/ap/20050106/ap_on_go_co/electoral_vote ; from "History in the Making: Dems Force Debate on Ohio Voting Irregularities," Democracy Now! (7 January 2005), http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/07/1621240 ; and the C-Span broadcast of the House debate, available at rtsp://video.c-span.org/60days/wh010605_house.rm
33 That Gore would have won is clear: see Robert Parry, "So Bush Did Steal the White House," Consortium News (22 November 2001), http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/112101a.html ; the figure of 23,000 votes is from Daniel Lazare, The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, The Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 4.
34 Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, "Ten preliminary reasons why the Bush vote does not compute...," The Free Press (3 January 2005), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1065
35 Robert Lockwood Mills, "The greatest story never told," The Free Press (20 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1006
36 Dom Stasi, "Moral victory: Religious exploitation, and the new American creed," Online Journal (23 December 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/122304Stasi/122304stasi.html
37 According to staff writers of The Nashua Advocate, over 97 percent of the vote-flipping incidents reported to the non-partisan Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) favoured Bush: see "News: Election 2004: Who's Reading the Words of 'Internet Muckrakers'? Diebold, For a Start...," The Nashua Advocate (14 January 2005), http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/2005/01/news-election-2004-whos-reading-words.html
38 Richard Hayes Phillips, "Default settings in Mahoning County," The Free Press (23 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1018
39 Phillips, "Default settings."
40 For evidence of the election-swinging potential of this form of fraud, see Anthony di Franco at al., "Small Vote Manipulations Can Swing Elections," Communications of the ACM 47: 10 (October 2004): 43-45, available at http://www.wheresthepaper.org/p43_di_franco.pdf
41 Dr. Werner Lange, "More Votes than Voters in Ohio: Absentee Vote Inflated, Certified Vote in Doubt," Democrats.com/unity (12 December 2004), http://democrats.com/ohio-absentee
42 Russ Baker, "Election 2004: Stolen or Lost," TomPaine.com (7 January 2005), http://www.tompaine.com/articles/election_2004_stolen_or_lost.php
43 Fitrakis, Rosenfeld and Wasserman, "Ten preliminary reasons."
44 These are the certified figures, from Cuyahoga County General Election: Official Results Report, which is no longer available on the web; the data can now be obtained from James Q. Jacobs’ website (see note 55 below). The figures first released after the election, before there had been a partial counting of provisional ballots, were still more shocking: 7.1 percent (Cleveland 6C), 13.05 percent (13D), 19.6 percent (13F), 21.01 percent (13O), and 21.8 percent (6B). Cleveland precinct 10L was initially reported as having a 24.72 percent turnout--a figure which rose in the certified results to a 56.21 percent turnout. Perhaps by some accident all of the provisional and absentee ballots cast in this precinct were counted.
45 Fitrakis, Rosenfeld and Wasserman, "Ten preliminary reasons."
46 Richard Hayes Phillips, "Rigging the vote in Lucas County," The Free Press (10 December, revised 24 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/979 ; and "Another third rate burglary," The Free Press (25 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1037
47 Richard Hayes Phillips, "Hacking the vote in Miami County," The Free Press (25 December 2004), http://www.freepress,org/departments/display/19/2004/1038
48 See Fitrakis, Rosenfeld and Wasserman, "Ten preliminary reasons."
49 Richard Hayes Phillips, "Election results in Southwestern Ohio," The Free Press (21 December 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1012
50 The letter is quoted in Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, B.1, pp. 54-55 note 240.
51 Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, B.1, p. 54 note 238.
52 Richard Hayes Phillips, "Estimated Vote Count in Ohio," The Free Press (5 January 2005), http://www.freepress.org/departments.display/19/2005/1071
53 See Teed Rockwell, "93,136 EXTRA Votes Found in ONE Ohio County," Rense.com (19 November 2004), http://www.rense.com/general59/one.htm ; and paragraph 20 in the second part of my essay "Election Fraud in America," Centre for Research on Globalization (30 November 2004), http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411D.html . Katherine Yurica republished Rockwell's essay, with Editor's Notes dated 21 November and 12 December 2004 blaming Cuyahoga County for "obfuscating the election results" and describing the essay as part of the "historical record of what transpired: i.e. Cuyahoga County published false information and then apparently corrected it." See Yurica Report: News Intelligence Analysis, http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04
54 The matter was explained, with ascending degrees of clarity and competence, by Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, "Latest Conspiracy Theory--Kerry Won--Hits the Ether," The Washington Post (11 November 2004): A2; David Knox, "Turnout turns out to be glitch," Akron Beacon Journal (10 November 2004), http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/10143328.htm?1c ; and "Cuyahoga County Precincts-Revised!" Americans for America, http://pages.ivillage.com/americans4america/id20.html
55 James Q. Jacobs, "Precinct Cross-Voting and Ballot Order in the Ohio 2004 Presidential Race," 2004 Ohio Election--Analysis, Summary, Charts, and Spreadsheets (14 January 2004), http://www.jqjacobs.net/bush/xls/ohio.html
56 '59sunburst,' "Cuyahoga Cty--2000 Bush Tallies Used to Fake 2000 Tallies?" Democratic Underground (27 December 2004), http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=197869
57 It is important to distinguish between these exit poll figures and the altered Ohio figures which were posted by CNN at 1:41 a.m. EST on November 3rd; these showed women voters splitting 50-50 in their preferences for Kerry and Bush, and men supporting Bush over Kerry by 52 to 49 percent. One must also distinguish, in the national exit poll, between the figures available at 9:00 p.m. EST on November 2nd, which show Kerry leading by nearly 3 percent, and the revised figures posted at 1:36 a.m. EST on November 3rd, which showed a 5 percent swing to Bush.
Richard Morin's claim that the later national figures were based on "later interviewing" that found Bush in the lead ("New Woes Surface in Use of Estimates," The Washington Post [4 November 2004]: A29) is demonstrably incorrect. As was immediately apparent from comparison of respondent numbers and percentage preferences, and as has since been acknowledged by the pollsters, these later figures were conflated with the vote tally percentages. See Michael Keefer, "Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2 Exit Poll Scam," Centre for Research on Globalization (5 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html ; see also "The Case for Fraud in Ohio Election 2004 (IX.A: Irregular/Impossible Changes in Exit Polls over time on Election Night)," Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, http://www.bpac.info
58 See 'TruthIsAll,' "BEST EVIDENCE: WP/Mitofsky/NEP (13,047 Random; MOE 1%): 547 million to 1," Democratic Underground (7 January 2005), http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x261825
59 For authoritative studies of the 2004 exit polls, see Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D., "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," Research Report from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate Division, School of Arts & Sciences Center for Organizational Dynamics (29 December 2004), available at http://www.matrixmasters.com/blog/usnewsarchive/2005_01_01_newsarchive.html ; Ron Baiman, "The United States of Ukraine? Exit Polls Leave Little Doubt that in a Free and Fair Election John Kerry Would Have Won Both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote," The Free Press (19 December 2004),
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/997 and Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., "The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data," The Free Press (28 December 2004),
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1054 . Other significant articles include Jonathan Simon, "47 State Exit Poll Analysis Confirms Swing Anomaly," Scoop (11 November 2004),
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm ; Alastair Thompson, "Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms New Suspicions," Scoop (17 November 2004),
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm#f1note ; John Allen Paulos, "Final Tallies Minus Exit Polls=A Statistical Mystery!" The Philadelphia Inquirer (24 November 2004), available at
http://www.math.temple.edu/%7Epaulos/exit.html ; 'TruthIsAll,' "Breaking: Washington Post Declares Kerry Won," Democratic Underground (4 January 2005),
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss.duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=229251&mesg_id=229251 ; and Mark Blumenthal, "Exits: Were They Really 'Wrong'?" Mystery Pollster (14 December 2004),
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/12/exits_were_the_.html The most lucid brief analysis of the weighting of exit polls that I have seen is in a sequence of postings by 'Fly by night' to a discussion thread initiated by 'TruthIsAll,' "I learned something about exit polls today," Democratic Underground (17 January 2005),
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=288785
60 For an initial comparison between the U.S. and Ukrainian elections, see Michael Keefer, "Election Fraud in America," Centre for Research in Globalization (30 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411D.html ; also published as "The Stolen U.S. Presidential Election: A Comparative Analysis," Autonomy & Solidarity, http://www.auto_sol.tao.ca .
61 For a small reminder of the wholesale rottenness of the election in Florida, see Bev Harris, "Vote Fraud--Volusia County On Lockdown," Scoop (18 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00246.htm ; and Thom Hartmann, "'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Fraud in Florida," Scoop (19 November 2004),
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00258.htm . And for a sample of the action on the west coast, see the excellent recent study by Paul R. Lehto, J.D., and Jeffrey Hoffman, Ph.D., "Evidence of Election Irregularities in Snohomish County, Washington General Election, 2004," VotersUnite.Org (6 January 2005),
http://www.votersunite.org/info/SnohomishElectionFraudInvestigation.pdf
62 Dr. Freeman's new article, "Hypotheses for Explaining the Exit Poll-Official Count Discrepancy in the 2004 US Presidential Election," should be published in the near future. The vote-tally figures given here, all of which are available from the Wikipedia site, are presented by Freeman in a somewhat more fully elaborated form.
63 On demographic grounds one would expect that over a four-year period more than five percent of the voters active in 2000 would have moved on to cast their ballots in a better world. A demographically-inflected estimate would increase the number of new voters in 2004--but since this would also increase Kerry's numbers at the expense of Bush's, I will hold to the exit-poll figure.
64 Los Angeles Times Staff Writers, "A 'modern' democracy that can't count votes. Special Report: What happened in Florida is the rule and not the exception. A coast-to-coast study by The Times finds a shoddy system that can only be trusted when the election isn't close," Los Angeles Times (11 December 2000), http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/12/11/latimes.votecount
65 The Denver Voice, http://denvervoice.org/protest_rally_11-20-04.htm
66 Jacob Weisberg, "The Complete Bushisms," Slate, http://slate.msn.com/id/76886
67 What may seem a particularly sour joke is perhaps no joke at all. The identity of the person who carried out terrorist anthrax-letter attacks in the United States in September and October 2001 remains unknown. However, the attacks were clearly intended to intimidate the Democratic opposition and the media: they targeted two leading Democratic members of the U.S. Senate, Senator Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), as well as major media outlets. Moreover, the anthrax was of the Ames strain, and came from a U.S. defence-biowarfare source; and there is strong evidence to indicate that FBI investigation of the anthrax attacks has been blocked as a result of high-level political interference. See Barbara Hatch Rosenberg (Chair, Federation of American Scientists Working Group on Biological Weapons), "Analysis of the Anthrax Attacks," available at http://www.911review.org/Wget/www.fas.org/bwc/news/anthraxreport.htm ; Patrick Martin, "Who is stonewalling the US anthrax investigation?" World Socialist Web Site (20 July 2002),
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jul2002/anth-j20.shtml ; and Steve Moore, "Why the FBI Cannot Catch the Anthrax Killer," Centre for Research on Globalization (16 April 2003),
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO304B.html
68 The name Caligula means "Little Boot." The Roman historian Suetonius reports that Caligula had planned to make his horse Incitatus a Consul (the highest position in the government of the Roman Republic); this would have entailed conferring senatorial rank upon the horse. See Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, revised Michael Grant (London: Penguin, 2000), IV. 55, p. 156.
Global Research Contributing Editor Michael Keefer, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Guelph, Ont. He is a former president of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English; his writings include Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars (Anansi).
To become a Member of Global Research
The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles in their entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet sites, as long as the text & title are not modified. The source must be acknowledged and an active URL hyperlink address of the original CRG article must be indicated. The author's copyright note must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
To express your opinion on this article, join the discussion at Global Research's News and Discussion Forum
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright MICHAEL KEEFER, CRG 2005.
www.globalresearch.ca return to home page
QUIET END TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY?
In the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave Congressional Intent to Eliminate We the People from Our Own Elections --- Congressional Failure to Secure and Guarantee Basic Rights to All AmericansAmericans Must Act Within Two Weeks to Restore Their Inalienable Right to Kick the Bums Out of Office"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them . . ." —Patrick Henry
"Give me Liberty, or Give me Death." ---Patrick Henry
WARNING: a bipartisan Congress will, in the next few days, attempt to violate your #1 Inalienable Right.
Having talked to many folks, I've not yet found an American who says this warning is not well taken. Although each person I've talked to understands they're being cheated by this; they just tend to think that other Americans won't listen, or think Americans too busy to preserve their own most basic rights.
Are Americans, in fact, too lazy or stupid to defend their own freedoms anymore? Some say that a few words about their own history will bore them to giving up their republic without so much as a fight, especially with an election law attorney writing like this as if he's Paul Revere.
Will cynicism mean that Americans give up the fight for their rights on their own soil?
Nowadays, some say American attention spans are so short that they won't be able to finish an essay like this of just a few pages, even when told that Abe Lincoln's "government of the People, by the People and for the People" depends on it.
I'm told regularly to use extremely few words, give a quick action request at the end, so that Americans can go back to their slumbers.
But I don't believe the pessimists. I choose to address all of those who read this as concerned citizens, instead of addled consumers.
I believe that Americans respond when they know what's at stake.
The USA did not become the world's richest country and sole military superpower for no reason.
They will read a few more paragraphs of context that help explain why this is so important, before it's time to prove why your #1 Inalienable Right must be defended. Americans by and large remember the sacrifices of citizens and soldiers over the generations -- millions of them who worked, fought, and died for the dream of American democracy – and they will not allow democracy to slip away during our generation -- on our watch -- if they understand clearly what's at stake.
So, to be clear, please let me explain. As an offer of my own seriousness about this, let me simply say I don't particularly need this fight: I've been in the hospital several times in the last year for as long as a week, and though medical bills and devotion to this cause have emptied the savings, and although fatigue follows me daily, and with two young children to worry about, I am nevertheless convinced of the need to give this my all.
After having sought the counsel of some fellow citizens and lovers of democracy, and short of funds and energy for renewing my license anyway, I've let my attorney license expire as a form of resignation as a lawyer, I will not have clients any more – other than American Democracy.
After having sought the counsel of some fellow citizens and lovers of democracy, and short of funds and energy for renewing my license anyway, I've let my attorney license expire as a form of resignation as a lawyer, I will not have clients any more – other than American Democracy.
I feel that what I've learned about elections I can not ration and sell at $200 an hour, when as many as possible need to know some things, and soon.In reaching this decision, I realized that the principles of our representative democracy are actually more important than life itself.
Otherwise, if this were not the case, how would you convince a man or woman to sacrifice their life for this principle of democratic self-government? By what other persuasion would we send our young to the front lines of war other than with some version of Patrick Henry's famous patriotic challenge: "Give me Liberty, or Give Me Death?"
Americans believe that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. But on our watch, there haven't been quite enough sentinels of democracy, there have been too few watchdogs of our Constitutional and Inalienable Rights: those Rights we're endowed with by our Creator under the Declaration of Independence.
That Declaration of Independence, and those American men and women took on a King and the world's mightiest military – they dared greatly. The wanted to remake the history of the world in favor of the principles of self-government.
A revolution of perspective would, they believed, restore this continent to a state of Nature, with free and equal citizens joining in communities to protect their individual rights and the commonwealth.
Today, historians write that we were the first nation founded on ideals – like "no taxation without representation," like "legitimate political power comes only from the people" via free and fair elections establishing the consent of the governed, and that laws in derogation of the natural rights of the People are Void and without effect.
On the purpose of government, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "governments are instituted to secure [our] rights." Thus from that day in 1776 forward, we would have "Government Servants" or "public servants," with the People as the Master of the government, and not the other way around.
With the right to vote for representatives and others, the People would never again be slaves to Tyranny or governmental abuse of power. Consequently, under the Declaration of Independence, the People have the Inalienable right to "alter or abolish" their Government servants if they no longer serve them well.
Today, we sometimes refer to this as the right to "kick the bums out." The very recognition of inalienable rights present at birth were an example and precedent for the whole world because, for the first time in European historical memory, the individual human being was an independent source of power and rights, just by virtue of being born.
In these notions, the Founders learned from both John Locke, and perhaps even more from the advanced civilization of the Iroquois, with its three branch form of government. We all remember that humans are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and … though the last word was originally "property," the Founders changed the word "property" in that phrase to the more familiar "pursuit of happiness."
In these notions, the Founders learned from both John Locke, and perhaps even more from the advanced civilization of the Iroquois, with its three branch form of government. We all remember that humans are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and … though the last word was originally "property," the Founders changed the word "property" in that phrase to the more familiar "pursuit of happiness."
The emergence of the "pursuit of happiness' in place of property emphasizes that Liberty is ultimately more important than Property. The real core of the American Revolution, the new idea with which the Founders wanted to "begin the world anew" was specifically that a government does not Grant rights (nor does it possess any rights); rather, as a servant of the people, the purpose of government is to Guarantee the rights of the people.
Pledged irrevocably to these ideals, the signers of the Declaration pledged and lost their Lives or their Fortunes, but they still retain their Honor today. By intentionally enslaving the Government as servant of the public's rights and happiness, the energies of a whole nation of individuals of diverse races, colors and creeds were unleashed to maximize their potential. As a result, Freedom, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, arises when a government of limited powers, working in trust, guarantees the individual rights of all citizens, thus unleashing the maximum potential of each person.
At the Seneca Falls Declaration of Rights in 1848 that launched women's suffrage movement, and again in Washington DC in Martin Luther King's civil rights speech "I Have a Dream" speech, the history of American can largely be told as a process of women and minorities and their families and supporters insisting that our country live up to its ideals, that it make good on the promises of the Declaration for everyone.
Though heroes like Susan B. Anthony worked their whole lives without seeing a ballot in their hands, their vision and their engines of progress forced the American Dream to grow. They insisted that the country make real its ideals, and they made it so. As many state constitutions and the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights state, frequently recurring to fundamental principles is necessary to the preservation of Liberty and free government.
Though heroes like Susan B. Anthony worked their whole lives without seeing a ballot in their hands, their vision and their engines of progress forced the American Dream to grow. They insisted that the country make real its ideals, and they made it so. As many state constitutions and the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights state, frequently recurring to fundamental principles is necessary to the preservation of Liberty and free government.
Today, we are faced with a choice of recurring to our own principles of Freedom and Democracy, or letting democracy die. Whenever we do not regularly bring to the fore these principles, they are eroded, chipped away, violated and harmed – just by the very process of not being considered because they are not at the negotiation table.
Though popular, Freedom is always at risk of intentional harm from people who think they have a better idea about how to live our lives or run our country than ordinary Americans do. Some of them are so convinced they will happily force you to go along for your own good. But freedom is only free if you are safe being unpopular.
Our representative democracy is always at risk of harm or manipulation because the passions of the day or the business interests at issue don't wish to leave their fates to a majority vote sometimes any more than you or I would like to have a spouse chosen for us by majority vote. Power is endlessly addictive to humans, once some government officials taste it, they don't want to stop and may try to stay in office by crooked means. Those of us on the internet often inform just our like-minded friends about internet polls in order to get them to help vote up our side of the issue. But this one-sided get-out-the-vote effort on our part makes the internet poll even less scientific or accurate than it was in the beginning, and because of this distortion it's the moral equivalent of stuffing the ballot box.
Now, given that we all try to stuff the ballot box for fun in these internet polls, imagine a real election where the stakes are just a little higher: like for example control of the world's richest country and sole military superpower up for grabs in a presidential election. Ever heard of the name President RutherFraud B. Hayes? That name was quite popular back in the late 1800s. Around that time, there was so much violence, intimidation, bribery and pressuring at and around the polls that the secret ballot came along as an innovation to reduce the intimidation and fraud.
Now, given that we all try to stuff the ballot box for fun in these internet polls, imagine a real election where the stakes are just a little higher: like for example control of the world's richest country and sole military superpower up for grabs in a presidential election. Ever heard of the name President RutherFraud B. Hayes? That name was quite popular back in the late 1800s. Around that time, there was so much violence, intimidation, bribery and pressuring at and around the polls that the secret ballot came along as an innovation to reduce the intimidation and fraud.
But the secret ballot did not make all the pressure on elections go completely away. It just moved location and changed tactics.
So now at last, we are left at the point of seeing where we are losing our most sacred democratic rights. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is one channel of political legitimacy and that's the elections. Everyone who votes takes a side and is biased. Many political issues have both sides believing that great injustice will occur if they lose an election. Most especially, because the government relies on elections for 100% of its power, money and legitimacy, it has a huge conflict of interest and can not administer elections without a check and balance from the public.
But We the People have been eliminated from a meaningful role in elections, because nobody counts and nobody can watch the counting of the vote on the new electronic machines. After well over a century of successfully hand counting paper ballots under the supervision of the public and the parties, and although the number of workers it takes per thousand hand counted ballots has essentially not changed, we've grown fond of the wonders of computer and grown tired of Election Night labors for democracy. Various types of computers have come in to take up the slack, both optical scanners using paper ballots originally, and touch screen computers, counting well over 80% of our ballots in complete invisibility and secrecy.
We the People are no longer able to keep our eyes on, or supervise, our own elections. We've been eliminated from elections by "modernization." The "modern" computers are amoral slaves that do whatever they are told to do without regard to law or democratic ethics. Their electronic hard drives operate invisibly. They might offer some convenience, but they also make us stand in line to wait for machines, and richer counties have shorter lines than poorer counties.
As might be expected given the nature of computers, numerous studies establish that one person with access to one results disk for about one minute can place a virus that can alter an entire county's election results, or alter an entire state's election results. Though elections have always been under pressure because of their stakes, this increases enormously the amount of cheating one person can do, how quickly they can do it, and how easily they can erase the evidence of what they did.
As might be expected given the nature of computers, numerous studies establish that one person with access to one results disk for about one minute can place a virus that can alter an entire county's election results, or alter an entire state's election results. Though elections have always been under pressure because of their stakes, this increases enormously the amount of cheating one person can do, how quickly they can do it, and how easily they can erase the evidence of what they did.
It gets even worse. The software that counts is the only thing that knows the true count, even the officials have no idea if the scanner or touch screen numbers are correct, barring the rare, expensive and (in Bush v. Gore 2000) terminable hand recount. We've been taught to be frustrated with the hanging chad to embrace the computer, claiming the chad is paper, but in fact it is a punch card, and every punch card ever made was for a computerized process of counting.
WARNING: With computerized voting, your inalienable right to kick the bums out, or your inalienable right to alter or abolish your government through elections, doesn't exist.
It is not secured for you by your government. They are not guaranteeing this right for you. In fact any corrupt election insider could, for money, partisanship, pressure, threat or in the belief of doing a great justice to the whole Nation, alter the election results undetectably, erasing the steps along the way.
As long as the total number of votes match up roughly, and one doesn't cheat more than say 20 percentage points, a whole industry of political pundits will chalk up the surprise victory to the last minute attack ad, or great get out the vote campaign, or a problem with the "loser's" platform, the weather, or any of dozens of other colorable excuses.
In short, with computerized voting by optical scanner or touch screen, your vote is simply whatever the invisible computer instructions say it is, computers can be programmed many months in advance, and instructing the computer to wait til election night poll closing before changing votes will defeat every test that ever happens, which are all with small amounts of votes anyway.
With a computer, it is really irrelevant what it does in a testing period the day before or the day after, it matters only what the computers in the real election (and we all know which ones they are) are actually instructed to do, on Election Day and election conditions.
This means that you do still have the right to kick out an honest politician, you just don't have the right to kick out a crooked politician. But of course, that's precisely when the inalienable right to kick the bums out is most needed: with a no good cheating bum.
Some folks in our government are accidentally or purposefully not checking in with or recurring to our fundamental principles frequently, as needed to preserve liberty and free government. If they did, they would recall that our Founders taught us that power corrupts, they would not ask us for trust. They would recall the America is about checks and balances, a form of distrust, and not about trust.
If they checked in with the Declaration of Independence, they would in the second paragraph realize that governments are instituted to secure us our rights. In order to SECURE the right to kick the crooked bums out as needed, our elections must be secured FROM the government.
If they checked in with the Declaration of Independence, they would in the second paragraph realize that governments are instituted to secure us our rights. In order to SECURE the right to kick the crooked bums out as needed, our elections must be secured FROM the government.
Our elections must be beyond the possible or ready manipulation of the government. If you are not serious about your rights or your freedoms, you don't need to take this seriously. But if you are serious about preserving American rights and American freedoms, most especially the freedom to get rid of any crooks, you had best cast a suspicious and jealous eye on the Public Liberty of elections. Be a sentinel of democracy, don't let democracy wither on your watch.
President McKinley said that Americans agree on principles, they disagree on politics or the application of principles. The principles outlined here for the protection of freedom and democracy are our Nation's most sacred. They are revered by Americans. An August 2006 Zogby poll I paid for with help from Nancy Tobi of New Hampshire and Michael Collins of electionfraudnews.com established that an incredible 92% of Americans supported a vote counting system where vote counting is observable by the public and the public can obtain information about vote counting. http://www.zogby.com/News/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1163
This is one of the highest political values ever measured in polls, yet the 90% secret vote counting that is taking place in America shows how incredibly out of touch our government, of both parties, is with every demographic group in America.
The only kind of voting system that is compatible with your inalienable rights and mine is one the public can watch like a hawk, and one that the public controls, and that it can observe. Given it is the duty of government to secure and guarantee our rights, specifically including the right to kick them out, elections have no choice but to be publicly controlled.
Those are the principles. Now for the politics that get a little debatable with some people. Essentially in the only system that provides for public control and observable elections is known as precinct counted hand counted paper ballots. Simply put, this system is running unopposed in the democracy race. We do not have a choice of much completely different systems. The ability to peacefully preserve freedom and democracy through elections is far too valuable for any objection to it to have weight.
But the Congress won't listen. Neither party listens to the needs of democracy, so they must hear from YOU the citizens. On May 6, 2007 the House Administration Committee reported out a modified bill called HR 811, also known as the Holt bill. In that bill's markup in committee, it got better and it got worse in various particulars, if you follow the debate.
One way in which it got much worse is that instead of source code for the computer that would be given away for any citizen's inspection, they committee put in language that made the source code a government-recognized trade secret, available only to "qualified" experts, and then only if a strict nondisclosure agreement is signed that incorporates trade secrecy laws of the states, which almost always contain harsh punitive damages and attorneys fees clauses for violating the secrecy.
One way in which it got much worse is that instead of source code for the computer that would be given away for any citizen's inspection, they committee put in language that made the source code a government-recognized trade secret, available only to "qualified" experts, and then only if a strict nondisclosure agreement is signed that incorporates trade secrecy laws of the states, which almost always contain harsh punitive damages and attorneys fees clauses for violating the secrecy.
This language is particularly ominous. I know of no time before that an American legislative body has ever tried to pass law to reinforce secret vote counting. Of course, having a copy of the source code does not tell us if that code is the same as what's used on election day, nor does it tell us what the actual voting computers are asked to do on election day.
It would be, of course, illegal for the software to differ, but it is readily possible to conceal a double Trojan Horse, for example, such that it is highly resistant to being found. It is not possible to verify that a piece of software remains unchanged, if it were, the problem of viruses would be solved since each program could self-verify whether or not it had been changed. As stated in the classic computer paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust" the only code you can trust is the code you wrote yourself and know nobody else has accessed.
It would be, of course, illegal for the software to differ, but it is readily possible to conceal a double Trojan Horse, for example, such that it is highly resistant to being found. It is not possible to verify that a piece of software remains unchanged, if it were, the problem of viruses would be solved since each program could self-verify whether or not it had been changed. As stated in the classic computer paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust" the only code you can trust is the code you wrote yourself and know nobody else has accessed.
As a consequence of all of the above, while computers have many wonderful uses, they are not compatible with democracy.
On the same infamous day of May 6, 2007, the House Administration committee did more than just insert language that would give a specific statutory "anchor" or claimed basis in law for secret vote counting. On that day they also dismissed, without allowing discovery via the Congress or hearing any evidence in the Congress, 4 Congressional election contests. Three were in Florida and one in Louisiana.
A remaining fifth contest in Florida's 13th Congressional District was not dismissed but already has a state court ruling holding that "trade secrecy" overcame the need to investigate the truth in that Congressional election. In another, Florida's 24th, candidate Clint Curtis collected many hundreds of affidavits showing his official results were underreported by 12% to 24%.
A remaining fifth contest in Florida's 13th Congressional District was not dismissed but already has a state court ruling holding that "trade secrecy" overcame the need to investigate the truth in that Congressional election. In another, Florida's 24th, candidate Clint Curtis collected many hundreds of affidavits showing his official results were underreported by 12% to 24%.
The House Administration Committee ignored and refused to hear this evidence, dismissing this and 3 other contests without any discovery of facts or any evidentiary consideration.
Pursuant to a self-serving law called the Federal Election Contest Act, the Congress claims to be the judge of its own elections! Thus, in one case that I personally litigated near San Diego California, in a June 6, 2006 special election for Congress, one of the candidates, Brian Bilbray, was sworn in only 7 days later, on June 13, 2006.
The June 13 Congressional Record recites that there were 68,500 uncounted votes on the very first count! This was considered a bellwether for the November 2006 congressional races, and Francine Busby led in all of the pre-election polls except one controversial one right before the election, where it's claimed she made a gaffe.
But regardless, the Congressional Record admits the results were unofficial, there were 68,500 uncounted votes in a race with a margin of less than 5000 votes, and it was weeks prior to the earliest date anyone can file an election contest or a recount request. But the Congressional Record states there are no "known" disputes or contests. Mr. Bilbray, a former Congressman known to many of the members, was sworn in.
But regardless, the Congressional Record admits the results were unofficial, there were 68,500 uncounted votes in a race with a margin of less than 5000 votes, and it was weeks prior to the earliest date anyone can file an election contest or a recount request. But the Congressional Record states there are no "known" disputes or contests. Mr. Bilbray, a former Congressman known to many of the members, was sworn in.
Subsequently, when two lady citizens sued to contest the election, Mr. Bilbray claimed that no state or federal court had any jurisdiction since only the Congress had an exclusive jurisdiction thanks to his premature swearing in. He cited Art. I, sec. 5 of the Constitution for the idea that the House could not be second guessed after an unconditional swearing. This insult to democracy and the people of the 50th District was made worse.
For having the audacity to question Mr. Bilbray's election termination maneuver, Bilbray countersued with a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) counterclaim for damages and attorney fees, a suit usually brought by the little guy against the big corporation. Plaintiffs Jacobson and Ritt never asked for money, they simply wanted their rights and their votes counted. But even for that privilege, the election officials jacked the recount price up about 7 times higher than similar races, for an estimated cost of $150,000. That's one expensive personal right to vote.
For having the audacity to question Mr. Bilbray's election termination maneuver, Bilbray countersued with a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) counterclaim for damages and attorney fees, a suit usually brought by the little guy against the big corporation. Plaintiffs Jacobson and Ritt never asked for money, they simply wanted their rights and their votes counted. But even for that privilege, the election officials jacked the recount price up about 7 times higher than similar races, for an estimated cost of $150,000. That's one expensive personal right to vote.
Our government "servants" while often noble in motivation, are also too frequently lazy or corrupt. Few know, since it was only reported in local Ohio news, that convictions have been obtained for rigging the 2004 presidential recount for Bush and Kerry, requested by the Libertarian and Green parties.
As shown by two felony convictions for rigging the Presidential recount in 2004 in Cuyahoga county Ohio show, partisanship is by no means the only motive that distorts elections. In cases like the inflated recount price tag above, government officials are very uninterested in having their first "official" counts made to look bad (they're human), and they are also very uninterested in working through Thanksgiving (one of the motives in Ohio's presidential recount rigging convictions).
In a nutshell, recounts and audits are so hazardous because they have many legal hurdles and take place after the election, when lots of pressure is put on the "sore loser" to concede. This means that only the first count really matters, and certainly the first count controls headlines, and swearing-ins.
As shown by two felony convictions for rigging the Presidential recount in 2004 in Cuyahoga county Ohio show, partisanship is by no means the only motive that distorts elections. In cases like the inflated recount price tag above, government officials are very uninterested in having their first "official" counts made to look bad (they're human), and they are also very uninterested in working through Thanksgiving (one of the motives in Ohio's presidential recount rigging convictions).
In a nutshell, recounts and audits are so hazardous because they have many legal hurdles and take place after the election, when lots of pressure is put on the "sore loser" to concede. This means that only the first count really matters, and certainly the first count controls headlines, and swearing-ins.
The presidential election, in particular, has a special time limit of December 13 that came into play with Bush v. Gore that makes post-election "remedies" very unreliable. But, it is very gravely concerning that the first counts are secret. Literally only the hacker or rigger knows what the true count is.
The greatly enhanced ability to cheat means we have reached more than just a dangerous time for democracy. With no basis for confidence in election results because indeed we have no evidence at all of the counts, we are forced to take the elections purely on trust instead of evaluating the evidence and the checks and balances.
The greatly enhanced ability to cheat means we have reached more than just a dangerous time for democracy. With no basis for confidence in election results because indeed we have no evidence at all of the counts, we are forced to take the elections purely on trust instead of evaluating the evidence and the checks and balances.
Publicly controlled elections must be restored immediately, based on considerations of the values of democracy. If we only consider non-democratic values like convenience, we'll end up with a non-democratic system.
Harry Truman laid it out straight: If you want just efficiency, you'll get a dictatorship.
The most likely route to a loss of freedom comes when realizing that a successful election criminal gets to be an election official or set election policy.
What if a bank robber got to be bank president and set bank vault policy? Thus, when protective of liberty