WCRS Podcast – fightback
Fight Back March 23, 2011
Submitted by fightback on Wed, 03/23/2011 – 7:03pm
Bob Fitrakis and Connie Gadell-Newton discuss a Senate Bill that requires voters to show a government-issued photo ID at the polls with guest attorney Cliff Arnebeck.
Dr. Robert Fitrakis
March 23, 2011
While Ohio public employees’ rights to bargain collectively are under siege, the Ohio Republican Party executed a perfect sleight of hand by disenfranchising nearly 900,000 Ohio voters. In the most vicious and direct attack on voting rights since Bull Connor ran amok in the deep South, Ohio House Republicans passed HB 159 that requires Ohio voters to produce one of four state photo IDs at the polls.
The only IDs that will be accepted in Ohio if this bill passes the overwhelming Republican State Senate are a U.S. passport, a U.S. military ID, an Ohio driver’s license, or an Ohio state ID. This is the most restrictive standard in the nation.
The Republican Party’s target is obvious. Studies indicate that 25% of African Americans nationwide do not have a government-issued photo ID, 18% of voters over age 65 do not have a photo ID, and 15% of voters with incomes under $35,000 lack the ID as well. Besides going after blacks, the elderly and the poor, the bill also sets its sights on college students. What do these people have in common? They tend to vote Democratic.
The Republicans refuse to discuss an amendment that would have accepted a college student ID with a photo from their own state-funded university, including The Ohio State University, one of the nation’s largest institutions of higher education.
Usually cautious critics like Dan Tokaji, Professor of Law at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law, offered dire assessments: “’Disenfranchisement’ isn’t a word to be used lightly. But it is necessary to capture this bill’s purpose and impact. Passage of this bill would restore our state’s unfortunate reputation as our nation’s capital of vote suppression.”
The Republicans are justifying their assault on the most basic and fundamental right by invoking the myth of “voter fraud.” Not only have academics like Lori Minnite documented in detail the absence of voter fraud in U.S. politics, Tokaji addressed the issue in Ohio: “The only documented case of impersonation I could find in recent Ohio elections involved absentee voting by a mother pretending to be her daughter. This isn’t surprising. The few people who attempt voter impersonation aren’t likely to risk criminal prosecution by showing up at the polling place; they are much more likely to vote by mail. The bill won’t do anything about mail voting fraud.”
Ohio Republicans have frequently cried “voter fraud” while at the same time they’ve hired their political allies like Triad, ES&S and Premier voting systems (formerly Diebold) to secretly count Ohio’s vote with proprietary computer hardware and software.
The only way to understand House Bill 159 is to acknowledge its historical significance as the new Jim Crow, which is an even more insidious form of apartheid. This new apartheid encompasses African Americans, and also fits into a deliberate attempt by Ohio Republicans to wage class war against the Buckeye State’s most vulnerable citizens.
What the Republican Party did first with Senate Bill 5 by attacking the pensions, health care and collective bargaining rights of public employees was to establish the shock doctrine, outlined by Naomi Klein. The Ohio Republicans are using the state’s projected $8 billion debt as an excuse to destroy the political base of the Democratic Party. First they destroy the public unions and now they’re going after those constituencies who are likely to support the progressive programs of the New Deal and Great Society.
Another way to look at the recent activity in Ohio is to see how closely it parallels what the CIA calls “economic destabilization” in the Third World. This tactic throws economies into crisis in order to achieve regime change. Since Ohio is one of the nation’s most important swing states, and no Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio, both Senate Bill 5 and House Bill 159 are the obvious opening shots in the Republican presidential campaign.
The Republicans are astute students of numbers and demographics. They understand that they can’t beat Barack Obama in 2012 unless they cheat by restricting voting rights. Sadly, the history of Ohio’s Democratic Party is to roll over and allow the Republicans to do whatever despicable racist and undemocratic acts they wish.
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
February 21, 2011
The escalating confrontations in Wisconsin and Ohio are ultimately about preventing the United States from becoming a full-on fascist state.
The stakes could not be higher—or more clear.
As defined by its inventor, Benito Mussolini, fascism is “corporate control of the state.” There are ways to beat around the Bush—Paul Krugman has recently written about “oligarchy”—but it’s time to end all illusions and call what we now confront by its true name.
The fights in Wisconsin, Ohio, and in numerous other states are about saving the last shreds of American democracy. They burn down to five basic realities:
1) The bulwark of modern democracy is the trade union. This has been true since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. All social programs can trace their roots to union activism, as can the protection of our civil liberties.
The first Germans Hitler put in concentration camps were neither Jews nor gypsies—they were trade unionists.
The attacks on state workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere have nothing to do with balancing budgets. That could easily be done without destroying collective bargaining.
For the hard-right, this is about busting unions, the last organized force standing in the way of total corporate control of the United States by the rich and richer.
2) The material essence of fascism is the extreme separation of rich and poor, a massive transfer of wealth from those on the bottom to those on the top.
The unbalanced budgets in Ohio and Wisconsin are rooted in huge tax cuts given to the rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Widespread poverty among those who might otherwise rebel is essential to fascist control of a government.
A largely ignored aspect of this fight is the hundreds of billions of dollars currently locked up in union, government and Social Security pension funds. With unions destroyed, this huge cache of dollars will fall quickly into corporate hands. The additional “benefit” for the financial elite will be tens of millions of impoverished elders desperate for low-wage jobs in virtual slave labor situations.
3) The crisis crippling states everywhere is directly related to the massive destruction of social resources by war. Since the end of the New Deal and World War II, the American elite have engineered the biggest dump of material wealth by military means in human history.
The trillions of dollars of pure martial waste poured into the Cold War and those in Southeast Asia, central America, the Middle East, Southwest Asia and elsewhere could easily have clothed, housed, fed, educated, and provided otherwise decent lives for all human beings the world over.
Instead, poverty, desperation and stratification have been guaranteed.
The entire economic crisis now gripping the United States can be directly traced to the military budget, which exceeds the sum of what’s being spent by all other nations combined. In a brilliant recent column, Robert Greenwald points out that the entire alleged shortfall in Wisconsin could be covered by bringing just 180 troops home from Afghanistan.
But the purpose of that deployment is to undermine national security, not to protect it. A frightened, impoverished, insecure nation is one dependent on its fascist elite.
Democracy demands and protects true material security among the people as a whole. That’s what’s really at stake in the battle to cut the military budget. The fights in Ohio and Wisconsin are surface manifestations of that bigger battle.
4) Mussolini also made it clear that corporate control of the media is essential to fascist rule. Whoever would seize power first took the radio stations, then the television stations. Now the internet is under attack. The free flow of information is fascism’s ultimate enemy.
So the relentless Foxist portrayal of the battles in Wisconsin and Ohio as pitting “responsible, austerity-minded” governors versus “lazy, irresponsible state workers” is utterly predictable.
So is the appearance of the media-created Tea Party “movement” on the side of the corporations. It’s standard corporate procedure to invent a faux “grassroots” to fight unions and working people. So finding phony corporate “populists” like Sarah Palin and New Jersey’s Chris Christie in the right-wing media limelight is utterly predictable.
5) It is no accident that the “job loving” union-hating governors of Wisconsin and Ohio (along with Florida) have rejected billions in federal funds for re-building passenger rail service that would create thousands of jobs.
A corporate state relies on central of energy. Rail service threatens the power of the oil and auto lobbies. Renewable energy would replace centralized fossil/nuclear sources with decentralized solar panels, bio-fuels, windmills, increased efficiency and the like. The push for federal nuclear loan guarantees is central to the corporate state.
The anti-union governor of Ohio is strongly focused on killing not only train service but all incentives for renewable energy. His energy plan is for extreme right-wing nuke-based monopolies like FirstEnergy to run the show. Atomic power is the ultimate weapon against community control.
For decades the term “fascist” has been dismissed from use in this country, and perhaps rightly so. Corporations have been dominant in the US since the 1880s, but we have managed to maintain a modicum of democracy.
It’s hard to see that happening if the remnants of the organized labor movement are crushed in Wisconsin and Ohio. Both states have long, important traditions of union activism.
In the wake of Citizens United, with the courts, media, Congress and presidency firmly in corporate control, we see no easy road to victory for working people.
“Vote the bastards out” has become a pipedream in the age of electronic voting machines. Especially in Ohio, a reliable electoral vote count is a thing of the past.
We also have a president who was elected with strong labor support and who is now genuflecting toward the unions. But US history is filled with Democrats who have betrayed their working-class backers, and this one may prove no exception.
So in the long run, we have only ourselves to rely on. The way to survival is not clear.
Ultimately, as Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
But from time to time, it does break. If these uprisings in Wisconsin and Ohio fail, there will—literally—be hell to pay.
Somehow, we must find a way to make sure they don’t.
—
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, which are at www.freepress.org, where Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES also appear. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE US is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH. Originally published by https://freepress.org.
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
January 10, 2011
An epic legal battle now rages between Karl Rove and Ohio election rights attorneys. The question is whether the public has the right to see full transcripts of a court deposition that could shed explosive new light on the bitterly contested presidential election of 2004.
The deposition came from the late Michael Connell, Rove’s IT guru. Connell died in a mysterious plan crash in December 2008, one month after he spoke under oath to election protection attorney Clifford O. Arnebeck. Connell had implanted the state-contracted software used to compute Ohio’s electronic voting tabulations during the contest between Bush and John Kerry.
On December 10, 2010, attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville Neighborhood Association case moved to release the Connell transcript in an ongoing legal struggle with Rove and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The King-Lincoln case was filed in 2006 by attorney Arnebeck alleging civil rights violations against blacks, young voters and others in Ohio’s 2004 election process.
Connell’s November 3, 2008 deposition in Cleveland concerned his role in the 2004 election and whether or not he was being threatened by Rove. Just over a month later on December 19, 2008, Connell died in the mysterious crash of his small plane near his Akron, Ohio, home. Suspicions of foul play surround the accident.
The Connell deposition has been sealed since his death. During the closing days of the 2010 election, King-Lincoln attorneys sought the deposition of Karl Rove in connection with his activities involving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in all Ohio elections since 2000.
Rove and Chamber attorneys, as well as the Ohio Attorney General’s office, claimed that there was no connection between Connell’s deposition and more recent activities involving Rove and the Chamber.
Connell’s attorney, James L. Ervin, represented Connell at the deposition and also represented Connell’s estate. He filed papers with the court asking for a 30-day extension of time to file a response to the court on December 27, 2010 regarding the opening of Connell’s deposition.
According to Ervin, “Mr. Connell’s deposition is comprised of questions, answers, and topics that are privileged and/or confidential and are reflected as such by being designated ‘sealed.'” No part of Connell’s deposition has of yet been made public.
Arnebeck told how Connell described what he did: “One, he integrated voter data files with the vote tabulation process in the Ohio Secretary of State’s office in the 2004 election and two, he broadened the accessibility to this information, including facilitating its appearance on a mirror site at the SmartTech offices in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”
“His testimony provided facts of a general nature. He did not, as suggested by his counsel, reveal or discuss anything that could be fairly described as a trade secret or an expert opinion,” Arnebeck asserted.
In the spring and summer prior to Connell’s deposition, contacts were made on behalf of Connell with both U.S. Representatives John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich in an attempt to have Connell testify before Congress regarding his role in the 2004 election.
Memorandum to U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich [PDF]
Ervin’s motion before the court states: “During calendar year 2009, Mr. Connell’s businesses, New Media Communications and GovTech Solutions, came under new ownership, and Mr. Connell’s Estate was probated.”
These pleadings before the court may offer insight into who exactly owns Connell’s election computer businesses. Ervin’s motion states: “because the deposition transcript addresses issues that constituted privilege and/or proprietary matters, the new ownership of Connell’s former businesses may have an interest in the deposition transcripts and may be the owners of the transcript.”
Ervin concludes “Decisions must be made as to who owns Mr. Connell’s 2008 deposition transcript….” This same line of argument has been used to allow private vendors to use secret proprietary source code in election software.
In a democratic society, the people should own Connell’s deposition. Karl Rove should testify under oath about the electronic machinery Connell devised to link Ohio’s 2004 real-time vote count to an obscure company in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That company was SmarTech, which according to public records, was hosting a website that was operating out of the White House on that election night.
Says Arnebeck: “Mr. Connell’s testimony is important to the plaintiffs and the public because it reveals how those seeking to steal the 2004 Presidential election in the State of Ohio, led by Karl Rove, were better able to do so through the utilization of these integrated data files and more accessible tabulation processes. SmarTech was simultaneously serving the electronic data processes for the George W. Bush presidential campaign in that election.”
—
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s four books on election protection are at freepress.org, where this article was first published. Disclosure: Fitrakis serves as co-counsel with Arnebeck in the King-Lincoln case and was at Connell’s deposition.
Original article posted here:
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2011/4046
It is now highly unlikely that any Democrat will be elected to significant statewide office in the state of Ohio for the foreseeable future.
The likelihood of another Democrat being elected to the White House has also become virtually nil in 2012. Since 1856, no Democrat (except John Kennedy) has won the White House without carrying the Buckeye State, which is now an essential impossibility.
The reason is simple: Ohio’s nontransparent computerized voter registration books and voting machines are solely controlled by partisan, private vendors. Ohio’s 88 counties operate under a “bipartisan” system in which the secretary of state controls the deciding vote in all circumstances. The only conceivable countervailing force is Ohio’s Secretary of State, who will be a conservative Republican in 2011. Former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell proved in the 2004 election that a devious secretary of state can easily manipulate the outcome of any relatively close statewide election.
Between the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, 1.25 million largely Democratic voters were purged from the voting rolls in the Buckeye State. Such eliminations cannot be effectively appealed. But they could be repeated and expanded upon by the new Secretary of State.
The Free Press obtained public records regarding voting hardware and software utilized in Ohio’s 2010 election by the state’s 88 boards of elections. All but three counties used Diebold or Elections Systems and Software (ES&S) technology. Fifty-five of 88 counties used the notoriously partisan Triad company to maintain their voter registration poll books.
The trilogy of Triad, ES&S and Diebold is one strongly tied to the Republican Party.
Election watchers with various election integrity projects have uncovered what they refer to as a “red shift adjustment” by exit pollsters. Instead of trusting the validity of their usually highly accurate methodology, exit pollsters are now putting more trust in election results provided by the partisan Republican-connected voting equipment companies.
Unadjusted exit polls are the gold standard in uncovering election fraud. Ohio’s 2010 unadjusted election exit poll results showed incumbent Governor Strickland defeating John Kasich by 50.1% to 47.4% of the vote. However, when Kasich won the actual vote on the voting machines provided and serviced by private Republican-connected vendors, then the exit pollsters adjusted the exit poll numbers to match the machine vote count.
Overwhelmingly, the adjustments are red, or Republican, in terms of a beneficial shift in what voters are saying when they exit the polls and what the Republican-connected voting equipment company machines are reporting.
Despite public pressure for universal automatic voter registration and hand-counted paper ballots, the unverifiable electronic voting system remains intact in Ohio and proliferates throughout the nation.
The source code for these machines is not available for public scrutiny. Nor is there a reliable paper trail provided individual voters or independent monitors.
Diebold voting machines malfunctioned during the Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) 2008 primary election. Diebold equipment purportedly failed to count votes when its memory cards were uploaded to computer servers. Cuyahoga County election officials accused Diebold of breach of contract, negligence and fraud and refused to pay the company. Diebold filed a suit against Cuyahoga County in May 2008 seeking payment for services rendered and claiming it had satisfied its contractual obligations in providing touchscreen voting machines.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner intervened on behalf of Cuyahoga County with a counter claim and went further, alleging that Diebold’s voting equipment had “dropped votes in at least 11 counties.”
Ironically, Brunner’s efforts to rein in the proliferation of inaccurate computerized machines in Ohio instead resulted in Diebold machines rapidly spreading like a cancer across the state.
In August 2010, Brunner settled a lawsuit with Premier (Diebold) election company. The settlement affected 47 Ohio counties offering less than half a million dollars in payments, but more surprisingly, the settlement required Diebold to provide its allegedly malfunctioning and inaccurate voting equipment for free to each county Board of Elections.
Diebold agreed to give away some 3000 free voting machines in Ohio, up to 15% of a county’s total. Diebold is also discounting its maintenance fee for computer voting machines by 50% if the counties continue to have the Diebold company service their equipment. If the counties no longer trust the Diebold touchscreen voting machines, the company is offering a 50% discount on its computerized optiscan machines.
In 2004, only one Ohio county used Diebold machines — in 2010 there were Diebold machines in 61 counties.
In the decade since the stolen election of 2000, centered around punchcard voting machines in Florida, the Democratic Party has done nothing to reform the electoral process.
In 2004, Blackwell used the election night period between midnight and 2am to shift the outcome from John Kerry to George W. Bush, thus giving Bush a second term in the White House. Private contractors hired by Blackwell outsourced Ohio’s election results to a private company, SMARTech, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The computer specialist who constructed the system that made that possible was Michael Connell, the long-term computer guru for the Bush family, and a close associate of Karl Rove. Connell was deposed under oath in a federal proceeding about his role in Ohio’s 2004 election the day before the 2008 election. He died in a mysterious plane crash a month later.
Connell’s IT apparatus with its fabled interfaces are still in place. Democrats controlled the governor’s mansion and Secretary of State’s office from 2007 until now, but no significant reforms have been put in place. The new Secretary of State will inherit essentially the same sets of controls used by Blackwell in 2004.
After reporting the widespread irregularities before, during and after the 2004 election, John Kerry’s legal team refused to investigate allegations of wrongdoing in Ohio.
Kerry spent more energy and money attacking those who investigated the irregularities than he did protecting the electorate from fraud and intimidation, or investigating what actually happened to the 2004 vote count. Kerry’s lead attorney in Ohio was from the Republican Taft family law firm.
Ohio Democrats continue to denounce the notion that anyone would tamper with the state’s vote count, while privately leaking information to the contrary.
The only reform capable of changing this situation would be a federal mandate requiring all elections be conducted on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic registration as citizens turn 18 years old.
But calls for electoral reform have been ignored, despite four years of Democratic control of the Buckeye State and two of Democratic control of the White House and Congress. Today more unmonitorable electronic voting machines are in place in Ohio and around the United States than there were in 2004.
Exit polls from the 2010 midterm elections in Ohio showed both Strickland and Democratic Attorney General Richard Cordray winning re-election. But their final official vote totals were uncontested by the Democratic Party, which ignored widespread irregularities and made no systematic attempt to monitor electronic voting outcomes.
In at least one instance in central Ohio, a certified election observer from the Green Party and a member of Brunner’s Voting Rights Institute was illegally ejected by police after talking to voters forced to vote provisionally at a polling site. Numerous other reports around the state indicated excessively high provisional ballots cast in inner-city wards, unexplained dropping of registered voters’ names from electronic pollbooks, and pollworkers incorrectly applying election laws and denying voters their right to vote.
In January, former Congressman John Kasich will be inaugurated as governor. The conservative Republican has presidential ambitions. A longtime Fox TV commentator, Kasich benefited from a $1 million check from Rupert Murdoch for his gubernatorial campaign.
Like Blackwell, Kasich is openly contemptuous of those who disagree with him.
In 2012 he will be governing the state around which, once again, the presidential election will almost certainly pivot. In that year, Ohio’s Secretary of State with trinity-of-evil vendors will, once again, have the electronic power to decide the outcome with a few strokes of a computer keyboard.
With control of the White House at stake, who among you thinks it would not be done?
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection at www.freepress.org, where the Fitrakis Files also reside. Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States and Solartopia! are at www.harveywasserman.com. This article originally appeared in the 40th anniversary issue of the Columbus Free Press.
Don Gibson, Green Party Chair, Franklin County
FCgreenparty@gmail.com
Connie Gaddell-Newton Franklin Co. Sect’y Green Party
Dr. Robert Fitrakis
http://www.wcrsfm.org/audio/download/1162/green_party_fight_back.mp3
If you want to stop and go back on the audio,click on the gray area of the player where it says track # and the time count.
What would you give to have Karl Rove testify under oath about the flood of millionaire cash he used to influence elections in the last election cycle?
What would you give to have Rove forced to testify about his activities during the stolen election of 2004?
Priceless, you say? Then click the link in this email to donate to the Columbus (Ohio) Institute for Contemporary Journalism’s Election Protection and Litigation Fund, and make it happen!
https://freepress.org/store.php#donate
Ohio election attorney Cliff Arnebeck has filed a two-count complaint against The Partnership for Ohio’s Future, an affiliate of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. Arnebeck charges that the Partnership is “…not truly independent, but rather has been coordinated with the Republican candidates, their agents, committees, parties and their de facto coordinated national campaign being directed by Karl Rove.”
Attorneys for the Ohio Chamber have moved to dismiss the case, and you can bet that a veritable army of highly paid Republican attorneys is ready to go to the mats to make sure that Rove is not forced to reveal the GOP’s secrets.
Arnebeck, co-counsel Robert Fitrakis, and a small band of election protection activists have borne the costs of this litigation on their own so far, but they need our help. If we give them the resources, they have what may be the last opportunity to get Rove to speak on the record about his election deceptions of the last six years. Arnebeck and Fitrakis estimate that they will need $12,000 for fees, copying costs, and other non-lawyer expenses, plus at least $11,000 for attorney costs, bringing the total to $23,000.
Here is where you can go to make a tax-deductible donation to support the litigation: https://freepress.org/store.php#donate
Here are two articles that describe the current litigation:
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2010/3981
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2010/3977
Here is an archive of court documents (pdfs) at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law that describes the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association versus Kenneth Blackwell lawsuit being brought by attorney Cliff Arnebeck and his team:
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/klbna.php
The election protection community helped to raise the money for the Ohio recount after the 2004 election. Let’s get together now to raise at least the $23,000 that will get Rove back on the stand and stop the flood of unmarked dollars that are undermining our democracy.
Boehner won but how the election proceeded was something to behold on the network screen captures.
1250 A.M. the final count changes, radically. Screen shot shows voter manipulation.
Jim suggests going to
http://tinyurl.com/29bmzqt
Fight Back November 5 – Post Election Discussion
Guest Cliff Arnebeck talks about the buying of elections by corporations.
previous Fight Back shows:
Pay2Play Movie and Rove Lawsuit
Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:16:09 PM
29:38 minutes (27.13 MB)Comments
Fight Back Oct 8th with David Rovics
Friday, October 08, 2010, 11:52:14 AM
30:00 minutes (27.47 MB)Comments
Fight Back oct 1st Jesse Muhammad
Friday, October 01, 2010, 11:13:36 AM
31:44 minutes (29.06 MB)Comments
Fight Back – Insurgent Theater
Monday, September 27, 2010, 9:07:45 PM
28:51 minutes (26.42 MB)Comments