Speaking Truth to Power. This is a synopsis laid out showing general and specific evidence refuting the the conspiracy theorist label on the 2004 stolen Elections.
Advocates who say there were serious problems in the 2004 vote want an AG probe
By Bill Cohen – November 20, 2007 Bill Cohen, critics are continuing to claim the election was stolen
Three years after the controversial presidential election in Ohio that put President Bush back into the white house for a second term, critics are continuing to claim the election was stolen. And now, they’re asking Ohio’s top cop to join their crusade. Statehouse correspondent Bill Cohen files this report.
http://tinyurl.com/3ykddya
Original Article:
http://statenews.org/story_page.cfm?ID=10830&year=2007&month=11
4/17/1996
by Bob Fitrakis
“Seek and ye shall find,” the Good Book tells us. As we approach Earth Day, we should applaud those students who staged a two-day sit-in in front of OSU President Gordon Gee’s office to elevate the issue of developing the wetlands at the Firestone estate in the Akron area.
The fabulously wealthy Firestone family, of tire fame, kept the land in pristine condition as a riding retreat. The family’s fortune allowed it to preserve some of Ohio’s most spectacular remaining wilderness. But, it’s not simply the wilderness–that includes century-old white oak and tamarack trees–that makes it unique. It’s the five bogs on the property, some of the last in the state, that propelled the students to action.
Those familiar with Ohio history know that the European settlers, in less than two centuries, have filled in 90 percent of the state’s original wetlands. Take a look sometime at 19th century maps of Ohio. You may find that your favorite mall or fast-food franchise is sitting on a former swamp site or built over an old creekbed. Early settlers, to say the least, were not as eco-friendly as the Native Americans they were brutally driving out. Neither did the settlers understand the intricate and delicate role of wetlands in our ecosystem. Earth scientists often describe the wetlands as a giant sponge that absorbs excess water from heavy rains. Most agree that the recent devastating Midwestern floods were caused in part by the loss of such a high percentage of original wetlands.
In September 1994, The Ohio State University purchased 1,500 acres of the former Firestone estate for $5 million–a rock-bottom price provided for in Raymond Firestone’s will. OSU trustees and President Gee, in the cynical tradition of quick-buck, megaversity land speculation, saw the chance to sell it for $15 million. Amidst allegations that the $5 million to purchase the land was improperly diverted from a university endowment, OSU strangely contracted with the Galbreath Company to sell the land. Those of you into scandals of the rich and famous may recall that the Firestones and the Galbreaths were merged by marriage. Not too long ago, the Firestone heirs were suing their in-laws in one of those nasty “you’re fleecing poor senile granny” suits.
The Galbreaths had just the right stuff to sell this hot new piece of property, according to the OSU board of trustees. Don’t look for any environmentalists on that board. Any analysis of the social class of the trustees gives new meaning to the tired old Marxist cliche “executive committee of the bourgeoisie.” So, when Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) members met with OSU’s Firestone working group, chaired by Trustee David Brennan on November 30, 1995, they were given a lesson in Classical Capitalist Economics 101. The students were told the university had one priority and one priority only–maximum economic gain. Some of the students believing that the university served other functions as well, say, educational, inquired as to what they could do to help preserve the wetlands. But there was only one correct answer on the pop quiz, and one university official supplied it, “Find someone with $15 million.”
Even more disturbing, the local Bath Township trustees want to designate the land as a natural preserve to be utilized for educational and research purposes. Thus, The Ohio State University, the flagship and pride of Buckeye higher education, finds itself pitted against 10 other Ohio educational institutions that want to use the land as an outdoor lab. This list includes the University of Akron, Kent State University, Oberlin College, John Carroll University, Baldwin-Wallace College, and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, among others.
OSU has gone into maximum spin control mode in order to obfuscate this issue. University officials claim that they have “sought and considered seriously the concerns of residents of the area surrounding the Firestone estate.” Moreover, they claim that they are “very sensitive to community and environmental concerns.” Yet, rhetoric aside, OSU has steadfastly refused to put any restriction on the land’s development. So they kill all the beavers, we get the bucks, buckaroo.
Recently in Ithaca, New York, home of the prestigious Cornell University, Wal-Mart tried to develop a similar wetland site. Only the well-organized outrage of the local citizenry prevented an environmental catastrophe.
OSU Executive Director of Communication Malcolm Baroway authoritatively intoned that it would be wrong for OSU to put restrictions on the land since it was protected by “federal EPA law.” Those of you who follow such things know that ever since George Bush allowed Vice President Dan Quayle to run amok with his Council on Competitiveness, federal wetland laws have more loopholes for wealthy developers than does the U.S. tax code. A developer is allowed to swap one wetland for another. Indeed, they’re allowed to dig a big hole in the ground, let it fill up with water in some suburban industrial park, call it a wetland, and exchange it for the likes of the bogs on the Firestone estate. Quayle in his genius, pretty much defined any standing water for more than a few days as a wetland. By Quayle’s definition, I could swap my basement for the Firestone wetlands and probably get away with it.
SEAC’s successful sit-in resulted in an open forum being scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, at 3 p.m. at the second floor conference theater at the Ohio Union, which President Gee has promised to attend. SEAC has found the courage of its convictions to take on the holy of holies, OSU. And as the Good Book also points out, a basic definition of righteousness is speaking truth to power. May truth prevail this Earth Day.
4/10/1996
by Bob Fitrakis
Building community begins with the assumption that everyone belongs, nobody is to be excluded. Campus Partners’ final plan submitted last week is the opposite: it’s about economic and class apartheid; of favoring chain restaurants and corporate anchor stores over independent small businesses.
The plan seeks to build a fortressed community with “gateways,” “calming zones,” and “defensible street closures.” This is arrogance and snobbery. It’s an attempt to protect the “right” people and keep the “wrong” people out. This is why the Frumpies on the Campus Partners staff (Formerly Radical Upwardly Mobile Professionals) and their apologists are personalizing their attacks against me. I’m sure they’ve got dozens of affidavits proving that I soaped myself excessively in the shower in ninth grade, but these attacks don’t change the substance of their “master plan” for the campus master race. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s available at a few campus area libraries and I’ve included page references.
Barry Humphries and his Frumpies have decided that they don’t like the campus area as it is, so they want to knock it down and bring Disneyland planning to the area. And I don’t exaggerate here, they state: “…The remaining 50 percent of the structures in the [High Street] corridor lack significant detail for reuse potential when the cost of renovation or their ability to provide appropriately sized retail floor plates is considered.” (15-9) They don’t like the businesses in these buildings, and they don’t adapt well to suburban strip mall taste and requirements, so they’ll be knocked down if they’re not accidentally burnt down.
They have three themes. First, in south campus where Papa Joe’s conveniently went up in flames, they want shopping and dining. They envision “better quality” restaurants (pg. 15-6), “higher caliber” bars (pg. 15-10), and nifty stores like “The Gap” or “The Limited” (pg. 15-6). Excuse me, if the Gap or the Limited want to come into the area, let them do it with their own resources and not with public welfare checks provided through Campus Partners. Oh yeah, they also think the area needs “larger record stores” (pg. 15-7). This is absurd. The campus area is home to the few remaining independent music stores in Columbus. Any attempt to drive out the likes of Used Kids would be a cultural crime against humanity.
Second, the Partners want “to create an art theme at 15th and High.” This will include a new performing arts center on the east side of High, presumably to compliment the already existing Wexner Center and Mershon Auditorium across the street. It’s also a good excuse to tear down a bunch of buildings that are being used improperly by the riff-raff in the neighborhood, according to Campus Partners’ criteria.
Third, and even more absurd, the Partners are planning an “international” theme for the Lane-High area. Their plan will destroy perhaps the most ethnically diverse neighborhood strip in all of Ohio: name another strip in Ohio that has affordable real Chinese, Indian, Korean, Ethiopian, and Mexican restaurants in such close proximity. Most likely they will remove this actually existing cultural diversity and replace it with the food court at Lane Avenue Shopping Center, or Chi-Chi’s.
As Randy Morrison of the Godman Guild pointed out in his comments on the Campus Partners plan, the plan requires massive “displacement” and another plan is needed to “mitigate” this. Campus Partners is undertaking an ethnic and economic cleansing of the university district. This sounds like the preferences of middle-aged, middle-class former students, not the actual students who have different tastes and limited incomes.
The plan is so vile and pernicious that Barry Humphries, the infamous demolition man from the Battelle neighborhood, needed to hire Frumpies to cover the destruction of some of the last remaining culturally diverse “free spaces” from the student movement of the 1960s. Those who built bridges 25 years ago to other ethnic and racial communities are now using their progressive credentials to blow them up. While muttering to themselves that they are still “stardust and golden” they are destroying the campus area in order to save it.
A basic definition of theft is taking something that doesn’t belong to you. Campus Partners is planning legally sanctioned criminal activity. Their Disneyesque centralized planning will destroy businesses and private property they deem unworthy. It will eradicate the organically grown culture, flavor, character and mystique of the campus area and replace it with plastic suburban sterility. They now look to the Ohio State Board of Trustees for their blessing–a board whose membership constitutes Ohio’s “power elite,” essentially the same class of people who deforested Franklin Park, sterilized the North Market and homogenized the Ohio State Fair. But this will be their greatest criminal caper.
It’s not too late to stop the insanity. People opposed to this plan need to rise up and use any means necessary to make your voices heard.
Dr. Robert Fitrakis finally gets the confirmation from the Columbus Dispatch about what he has been saying all along. Vote switching has its day.
Below is the link to the Vblog:
November 14, 2007 Community Leaders Forum
Discussion of “Shadow of Afghanistan”
Bob Fitrakis will discuss the situation in Afghanistan and the currently running Drexel Gateway movie “Shadow of Afghanistan.” Free. 7pm.
Location: First Unitarian Universalist Church, 93 W. Weisheimer Rd., Columbus 43214
Phone: 296-6304
Email: earlword@yahoo.com
Website: http://www.shadowofafghanistan.com/
The November 15 Third Thursday Theater night film has changed:
Instead of “The War Tapes” (which we could not get permission to show)
we will play: “Shadow of Afghanistan”
Finally, the Columbus Dispatch did some real reporting on the problems endemic to e-voting machines. On page 1B of the November 8, 2007 Dispatch, Barbara Carmen and Bruce Cadwallader do a nice job of reporting on how Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE) officials refused to remove the name of Jay G. Perez from the ballot. Perez, an unendorsed Dem running for judge, withdrew on September 8, well prior to the November 6 election day. Perez ended up with 7% of the vote, with the endorsed Democrat Patsy Thomas losing by 5% to the Republican candidate.
The Dispatch wrote the following account of the explanation given by Franklin County BOE officials: “While the electronic machines are high-tech, election officials say they are less nimble at permitting last-minute corrections than the old machines.”
The article goes on to offer one of the most damning assessments of e-voting ever offered in print in the following paragraph: “Election officials from other counties confirm that pulling a candidate’s name after the database has been sent could shift the ballot: candidates’ names might no longer align with the tally of the votes.”
The Dispatch has broken from the mainstream media press’ penchant to call this problem a “computer glitch” or “recalibration” problem. It’s vote flipping. It’s recording the wrong vote. In 2006, it most likely cost Carol Squire the election for Domestic Judge in Franklin County when the uncertified software and hardware was added to the e-voting machines after the ballot was set.
In 2004, ES&S, Diebold and Triad technicians were documented showing up around rural Ohio and “tweaking” the machines with new software and patches just prior to Bush’s unexpected victory. A victory that contradicted the exit polls showing a 3 point Kerry win.
Let’s see, a 3 point Kerry win becomes a 3 point Bush victory at the last second. People tell us they voted one way and the machines appear to record another.
E-voting has destroyed American democracy.
Highest Bidder
[google 5293358684028460699 nolink]
Totally off Course
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTv7cSBNGXI
also…
BLACKWATER : THE SHADOW WAR
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3589824849379942402
Be Careful What You Say 2
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-7614841975549948776
KING GEORGE vs USA
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=3842528486406273821
Lynching by Laptop Part 2
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=29166033447680735&q=Lynching+by+Laptop
Dying Regime
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=378229989470389403&q=Dying+Regime
Be Careful What You Say
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=98845005530349156&hl=en
Dying Regime Part 2
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-316522221891913371&hl=en
PEACE !
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. -Frank Zappa
J.F.William
JFWilliam.com
YouTube
Saturday, November 10, 2007
6:30pm-midnight
1000 E. Main Street
Join the Free Press and Ohio Honest Elections for a casual get-together to enjoy refreshments and progressive company. Let’s talk about this past week’s election and our organizing to assure the presidential election in 2008 is free and fair! Looking forward to seeing you there.
Parking in rear or next door at the Salvation Army.
truth@freepress.org
253-2571
4/03/1996
by Bob Fitrakis
You’re in the booth this fall. You scan the names for President: Clinton, Dole, Nader, Buchanan, Perot. For the first time, instead of voting for the mainstream, we may have the choice of the radical left, right and center respectively.
Nader’s already on the ballot in California and the Northeast Ohio Greens are pledging to put him on the Ohio ballot as an Independent. Perot is hinting he wants to run, mostly by shouting to anyone who’ll listen: “Draft me!” Whether or not Buchanan ends up on the ballot depends on how much Dole dumps on him at the Republican convention in August. Pre-existing right-wing parties with ballot status like the U.S. Taxpayers Party could provide safe haven for the routed Buchanan Brigades and the troops necessary to get him on the ballot and turn out the vote.
If Clinton runs to the center with nothing new to say this campaign season, many progressive Democrats like myself will have little trouble pulling the lever for perhaps the most principled man in American public life–our beloved Ralphie. Sure, we understand that Newt Gingrich recently led the “barbarians to the gate,” but his social Darwinism and his George Wallace with a Ph.D schtick seems like a spent political force. If Dole runs as a centrist also, it won’t matter that much whether Bill or Bob is the Presidential caretaker. As corporations continue to downsize, rightsize, riff, pink slip and write off U.S. workers, Bill will, no doubt, feel our pain more than Bob. But unless he proposes to do something about it, as Ralph, Pat and Ross surely will, there’ll be a proverbial plethora of third party votes.
In mid-February, the Labor Department reported that median wages for fulltime male workers is almost nine percent less than it was in 1979. The New York Times points out that pay for top level corporate executives has “soared to nearly 200 times that of the average worker, compared with only 40 times that of the average worker two decades ago.” The arrogance of the corporate elite in the global economy is now well established. Steven Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley predicted a “worker backlash” even before Buchanan rode the NAFTA issue to a shocking political upset in the New Hampshire GOP primary. NAFTA now stands as a metaphor for economic despair and anxiety. While it didn’t start the trends toward lower wages, NAFTA sure as hell helped accelerate them. It’s a manifestation of the greater problem of top-down corporate control and undemocratic dominance over our lives.
On January 1, 1994, when NAFTA–a truly strange and bizarre idea to merge the world’s most advanced high-tech economy with a third world country–was implemented, what was then a small trade surplus with Mexico is now a $15 billion a year deficit. Clinton took a bundle of money from the notorious K Street international trading crowd–essentially Dole’s donors–to push a conservative multi-national corporate pact that won more Republican than Democratic votes in the House. The President conveniently points to the European economic community as precedent. Yet he fails to mention that the European Common Market was put together over a couple of decades and it includes all first-world developed countries, a freely elected European Parliament as well as continental environmental and worker safety standards.
The NAFTA issue isn’t going to go away. A recent poll shows that 55 percent of U.S. citizens now regard NAFTA as a bad deal. In fact, anti-NAFTA sentiment is what’s creating the openings for Nader, Perot and Buchanan in presidential politics this year. It is vitally important to understand why each is opposed to the pact that both Clinton and Dole promote.
Loss of the U.S. manufacturing base is why Perot’s followers, despite the failure of his Reform Party to gather enough signatures, are motivated and most likely to place his name on the Ohio ballot as an Independent come August. His being a wacky and semi-paranoid billionaire aside, Perot, while on the Board of General Motors, consistently fought to keep auto manufacturing in the United States. Perot upholds the tradition of Henry Ford. Fordism, while not in and of itself progressive, argued that a stable middle-class society can only be achieved by paying stable middle-class wages. Perot is not overly concerned with the human rights abuses or ecological disaster associated with NAFTA.
Nationalist and isolationist voters, prone to Buchanan’s appeal, are driven by anti-immigrant hysteria and job loss. This “Fortress America” national front sees not the exploitation of U.S. and Mexican workers and environmental degradation, but hordes of little brown people swarming our territory and taking our jobs. They need to realize that what we call the southwest United States was formerly the northern half of Mexico prior to the Mexican-American War. And the real enemy are those in the corporate boardrooms who are equal opportunity debasers and degraders of workers and the environment. It’s not likely that a “Know-Nothing” coalition uniting xenophobe and homophobe is the future of U.S. populism.
Nader, on the other hand, will show real compassion, not only for the nearly one million estimated U.S. workers who have lost their jobs due to NAFTA, but for the even more unfortunate Mexican workers being mercilessly exploited by U.S. corporations in the sweatshops known as the maquilladoras. And he’ll also eloquently speak out against the factories spewing toxins that know no border.
–Bob Fitrakis visited the maquilladoras in January 1993 and co-produced a video entitled The Other Side of Free Trade.
Published October 29, 2007
Podcasting Truth T o Power