Archive for category: Fighting Corruption

Let a thousand lawsuits bloom! The coalition of civil rights groups that sued the state of Ohio and Blackwell, is to be congratulated. Voting should be a guaranteed constitutional right, like free speech. Voting should be standardized, universal and easy.

What the Republican Party is doing, all too often with spineless Democrat acquiescence, is shrinking the electorate while their corporatist Christo-fascist politics dedicated to war and massive war profiteering are alienating the majority of Americans. Blackwell’s latest anti-democratic directive, requiring each person who registers voters to individually return the form, is ludicrous – just like his directive for 80 bond un-waxed requirement for voter registration forms in 2004.

In a real democratic country, Blackwell would be serving time in jail for violating constitutional rights, not running as the gubernatorial candidate of a major party. Blackwell’s policies led to mass purging of voters in the 2004 election with nearly 25% of all the voters purged in the city of Cleveland. It led to the unnecessary and widespread use of provisional ballots. While Blackwell likes to point out there were a high rate of provisional ballots approved, that’s because in Republican-dominated counties the boards of elections never enforced his absurd rule that if you were a registered voter voting in the wrong precinct, but the right county, your vote wouldn’t be counted from the county level to the presidency.

Blackwell claims he’s not repressing “African American” votes although, despite being black, he loses the African American vote by 20% to Democratic opponents. This is true. Blackwell represses not only black voters, but the elderly, poor and college students – that is, all the traditional Democratic voting blocks and the core of liberal and progressive voters in Ohio.

There are many other areas that Blackwell should be sued over, but more than anything, there should be a criminal investigation on how he became a multi-millionaire while on the public payroll and the obvious trail on the 2004 stolen election. Instead of rewarding him for helping Bush (and now himself) steal elections, he should be punished. Blackwell symbolizing the death of democracy and the rise of a new kleptocracy – rule by thieves.

Unlike most western democracies, the United States only became a democracy some 40 years ago with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our country hired federal registrars, who were allowed to pack sidearms to break the tyranny of racist white Dixiecrats.

Now we have the new Jim Crow. You get a black man to do what Bull Connor and George Wallace did forty years ago. J. Kenneth is shrinking the electorate. He’s targeting minority and poor voters. He’s making it a crime to register people to vote. He’s doing the bidding of objectively racist white politicians like Republican Senator Jeff Jacobson of Vandalia, Ohio. The Secretary of State has come up with his interpretation of new registration rules. If you register new voters, you must deliver each voter’s new registration form in person within ten days to the Board of Elections in each person’s county of residence or face fifth degree felony charges.

This is the same Blackwell who threw out 356 votes in Franklin County because voters were in the right precinct, but pollworkers gave them a provisional ballot. This is the same hater of poor and minorities and ass-kisser to the rich, who returned voters’ registration forms because they weren’t on 80-lb. unwaxed white paper. This is J. Kenneth Blackwell, a black face on a red neck.

So, Ken Hackwell is taking credit for the high voter turnout in the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. Today’s Columbus Dispatch reported that the Hackwell campaign states “The facts of the record show that Secretary Blackwell’s leadership resulted in record-setting voter turnout and voter registration drives in which one million more Ohioans gained the opportunity to vote.” It’s about time that he fessed up and took credit for his crimes. I have no doubt that Hackwell was responsible for the 131% voter turnout in Clyde, Ohio, initially reported. Also, I think he was behind the 124% and 120% turnout in two precinct in Perry County. And surely, a man of Hackwell’s religious faith was responsible for the glorious miracle of the loaves and fishes precinct in Gahanna Ward 1B, where 638 people voted, and 4258 votes were delivered unto the prodigal son, George W. Bush. And he’s no doubt responsible for that 98.55% turnout in that one precinct in Miami County. Indeed, wherever far-right white evangelicals surge to the polls, unseen to naked eye, at the last second, Hackwell should rightfully claim that cybervote.

Likewise, he should admit to massively repressing the votes of the least of our brethren, in Cleveland and other urban centers. Hackwell did everything he could, as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Committee to make sure that black and poor voters were disenfranchised. Hackwell likes to compare himself to Gandhi and King – what he forgets is that these two giants Enfranchised people, they did not disenfranchise people.

Below is a piece I wrote right after the election that reflected his attack on black voters in Ohio’s inner cities. Hackwell’s “let every white Republican to vote twice campaign” should be placed alongside of Hackwell’s Jim Crow thuggery. Fewer people voted in the city of Cleveland in 2004 than in 2000, despite the “record turnout.” Read more

The guilty plea on state and federal corruption charges from Terrence W. Gasper, the former Chief Financial Officer at the Ohio Bureau of Worker’s Compensation (BWC), masks a much greater scandal involving the systematic corruption of Ohio politics dating from former governor George Voinovich’s administration. As the Columbus Dispatch showed today, Gasper was hired at the direction of the late Paul C. Mifsud. Mifsud, who was Voinovich’s Chief of Staff, had direct ties to the Bush family. Mifsud was a former military intelligence officer who liked to brag of CIA connections and controlled a shadowy group called the Maltese Benevolent Society. Mifsud ran George H.W. Bush’s 1980 campaign for president in the Buckeye State as well as co-managing his 1988 run for president as well. Voinovich allowed Mifsud to essentially use Mafia-style “bust-outs” to collect political slush funds to bring the Republican Party to dominance in Ohio.

Mifsud saw the Ohio BWC as a cash cow and directly recruited convicted felon Tom Noe, a hobby shop owner from the Toledo area who sold baseball cards, beanie babies and a few old coins to secretly administer a $50 million rare coin fund. It was no surprise when he pleaded guilty to federal charges for laundering more than $40,000 into the 2004 Bush campaign. Much of this is outlined in my book “The Brothers Voinovich and the Ohiogate Scandal.” The Ohio Society of Professional Journalists awarded “The V Report” first place for coverage of government in Ohio. Basically, I detail former governor Voinovich’s corrupt activities through the legendary duo Paul and Pauly, that is, the late Paul Mifsud with his murky CIA ties and the late Pauly Voinovich, George’s brother, with ties to the mob.