Where Do You Hide With A Stolen Election, Stolen Planet
Having just watched the premier of Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” I couldn’t help but see the parallels between the global warming issue and the 2004 stolen presidential election. Gore related his attempts over the years to get Congress, the media and the public to believe that global warming is a crisis, only to be derided and discredited. Those of us who expose stolen elections often receive the same reaction – mostly from the media.
I had the privilege of seeing Vice President Gore’s presentation live at the Ohio State University on April 16, 2004. So it was no surprise when I heard theatergoers gasp as Gore presented the scientific evidence for global warming. The charts, the graphs, the pictures – all make a clear and convincing case.
My forthcoming book, with co-editors Harvey Wasserman and Steve Rosenfeld entitled What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election (New Press), attempts to put the issue of Ohio’s 2004 election in a similar light.
Mark Crispin Miller recently wrote in his open letter entitled “Some Might Call it Treason,” to Farhad Manjoo, an election theft “denialist” on salon.com, that when “extremely bright” people refuse to consider the possibility of a stolen election, it is often the result of “a subtler kind of incapacity: a refusal and/or inability to face a deeply terrifying truth.”
Part of the appeal of Gore’s quest in “An Inconvenient Truth” is that he also knows we have convenient and ready technology to turn around the terrifying horror of global warming – reducing the use of fossil fuels and carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Those in the petroleum industry who have a vested interest in producing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming realize that all they have to do is call him names such as “eco-kook” or muddy the water by paying some pseudo-scientific de-bunker to assert the opposite.
The same is true in election rigging. Those who do the hard work of the public records requests, ballot counting and number crunching are dismissed out of hand as “conspiracy theorists” by Republican spin doctors. Even worse, self-proclaimed progressive and left publications like Mother Jones and salon.com join the fray and denounce those seeking the truth with such terrible words as “leftists” and “activists.”
The irony of the Free Press being attacked by Mother Jones magazine, a magazine that willfully embraces the name of one of America’s greatest leftist activists, is beyond belief.
Bobby Kennedy spent half a year or more investigating the stolen election with a slew of Ph.D.s like Richard Hayes Phillips, Ron Baiman, Steve Freemen, myself and Mark Crispin Miller – and salon.com dredges up a blogger with a bachelor’s degree to rebut the argument with one day’s investigation. Doesn’t honesty and integrity require the de-bunkers actually look at the data produced?
I was shocked when Mother Jones journalist Mark Hertzgaard told Free Press Senior Editor Harvey Wasserman that I was wrong on the election theft because he made a few phone calls to election officials in Ohio from his mansion in the Bay area. He came to his conclusion without first ever talking to me or looking at any data. Farhad Manjoo of salon.com adopted a similar tactic in simply refusing to look at the mountains of evidence in the public record produced by a year and a half investigation by award-winning journalists.
While one would expect the likes of Sean Hannity to dismiss myself and others as “idiots,” historically there’s been a higher standard among progressive intellectual journals and magazines. I’m a big fan of open debate and the production of actual documents and would be more than willing to debate Hertzgaard, Manjoo or any others before an inquiring audience.
Through sheer dogged determination, Al Gore manages to convince skeptics all over the world that global warming is a problem, and one that needs to be solved. The problem with most of the progressive de-bunkers of election theft is that they don’t trust the people to solve the problem. But just like the ending of “An Inconvenient Truth” when Gore spells out the technology available for resolving the climate crisis that we fear, we also have readily available technology to stop election theft.
It’s called paper and pencil.
Ninety-five percent of all the democracies on Earth have figured this out. Thus, there’s still hope for Mother Jones, salon.com and frightened progressives everywhere.
Why are these liberal rags gainsaying your credibility? Unbelievible.
Are they imbibing too much?
Just when help is most crucially needed, they abondon you.
As Hans Solo said in Star Wars “Then I’ll see you in Hell.”
Please send this to your Reps and the local papers!
“Considering the election problems which have come to light since the 2004 presidential election and Kenneth Blackwell’s affiliation with them, he should not in anyway continue to be in charge of elections in the State of Ohio, especially his own.
He is unfit to fulfill this obligation and we DEMAND that he step down from election supervisory responsibilities. Please see http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/ and also http://ohioelection2004.com/ the evidence is incontrovertible and the intend of this totalitarian religion masked cabal plain.
Please go here and sign this petition and PASS IT AROUND!
http://www.usalone.com/cgi-bin/petition.cgi?pnum=253
Latino/s, immigrants and the theft of the 2008 election
I attended the talk by BBC journalist Greg Palast last night ( author of the new book; “Armed Madhouse” about the Bush administration, http://www.armedmadhouse.com)
and was gratified to hear someone of stature state publicly the thesis
I’ve been repeating since early in 2005 – that Latino/a voters and
immigrants are the “next frontier” in the current bi-partisan
administration’s plans to hijack the American electoral process.
A little background;
Those of us who became active in what we referred to as “election
protection” in early 2004 which included everything from battling
Secretary of State Ken Blackwell over his conflicting rulings on voter
registration to opposing the spread of electronic voting machines had
two intentions; to secure the integrity of the electoral process and to
protect the voting rights of all eligible voters. We witnessed a litany
of injustices committed against the voters by election officials of BOTH
major parties but the most glaring violations seemed to center around
voter registration and the electronic machines which we knew to be
utterly manipulable and insecure. Our opposition to the machines,
however allowed our efforts to be too easily dismissed by machine
advocates who accused us of being resistant to change, squeamish about
new technologies and of being “conspiracy theorists”. Our other work
which included helping voters in poorer inner city precincts get to the
polls, comforting the folks forced to wait in long lines, dispatching
lawyers to polling places when voters rights were being abridged, etc.
went largely un-noticed by the press.
The exit polls as of midnight on election day showed John Kerry
with a small but decisive lead over Bush ( one must wonder if that lead
could have been wider had Kerry actually had a platform) but by morning
the reported tallies had shifted dramatically and Kerry conceded even
though several hundred thousand votes in Ohio had yet to be counted.
Jumping ahead, here; we now have ample evidence that the Ohio
election was riddled with fraud – legally defined, amply documented and
un-disputed statutory fraud. Lawsuits have been filed and are still
on-going including one brought by the League of Women Voters ( and many
more are coming shortly) and our on-going investigations are uncovering
more evidence all the time. On Monday I was part of an investigative
team that poured through the signature books and ballots in one rural
Ohio county and I can tell you that what we found was absolutely
shocking (details will be published as soon as the investigation there
is completed).
Our investigations have also revealed consistent patterns of
deliberate targeting of African American voters for disenfranchisement.
We saw this in Florida with the illegal purging of voters from the
registration roles (mostly African Americans) and that took place in
Ohio, too under the direction of Ken Blackwell. We saw shortages of
voting machines in Black and Latino/a precincts as machines were
re-assigned to affluent neighborhoods. We saw Republican “challengers”
in the polling places who came prepared with lists of ( mostly Black)
voters whose legitimacy was then questioned forcing those voters to vote
using “provisional” ballots – and then we saw many of those ballots
discarded and not counted at all.
Ohio wasn’t alone, of course but it was pivotal. Nationally
more than 3 Million ballots were never counted – mostly due to
“spoilage” (ballots being un-readable by electronic tabulators) and as
Palast shows in his book more than 80% of the “spoiled” ballots came
from African American, Latino/a and Native American voters. New
obstacles to voter registration such as voter ID requirements are
expected to inhibit large numbers of people from becoming eligible to
vote in the coming elections and the majority of those affected will be
Latino/as and immigrants and Native Americans. For economically
disadvantaged citizens who must obtain state-approved identification
under the new laws the fees required to obtain the necessary documents
have been described by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under The
Law as equivalent to a “poll tax”.
Add to that the millions of voters for whom poverty and poor
health or illiteracy kept them from casting their votes. Economic
decline due to industrial flight to the Global South is on the rise just
as “Free Trade’s” victims throughout Central America are streaming
North out of economic necessity. Fortunately for the Pentagon U.S.
citizenship is not a requirement for enlisting in the new “Army of Juan”
which lends a new meaning Malcolm X’s famous speech titled; “The
Ballot Or The Bullet”.
I learned in February of 2005 that the new voter ID
requirements are part of an anti-immigrant campaign that has its roots
in the “Protect America Now” (PAN) network of white supremacist
organizations when I interviewed one of PAN’s founders. She told me
that Ohio, Tennessee and Georgia were all high on their list of states
in which they intended to push for both voter ID requirements and also
english-only ballots by working with certain legislators ( and local
officials including mayors and sheriffs) with whom they had quietly
cultivated relationships. These are the same people who are behind the
rash of anti-immigrant bills including Arizona’s Prop 200, California’s
Prop 184 and the infamous House Bill 4437 which passed this year with
bi-partisan support.
Greg Palast predicted that just as more than 3 Million
mostly African American votes were discarded in 2004 there may be as
many as 5 Million votes in 2008 that will never be counted – most of
them belonging to Latino/as, Native Americans and recent immigrants.
It should be clear that although this may have the
appearance of being a partisan strategy for perpetuating Republican
control of all 3 branches of the government it is actually less about
one party’s domination than it is about preventing the rise of an
independent political base among the American population. Granting
citizenship to 11 Million Latino/a immigrants carries the possibility of
adding 11 Million new voters to the rolls – but it’s not merely the
votes that the controlling elite are worried about, it’s the potential
that a whole social moment may take root – one that demands genuine
justice and real reform. The present backlash against immigrants may
have less to do with personal prejudice and un-founded economic fears
than with a concerted strategy to undermine the right of the entire
electorate to hold their elected officials accountable.
Voting rights are an integral part of immigrant rights and
both are essential for the preservation of democracy. The current
legislative assault against immigrants is an attack on democracy itself
. Nothing less than our collective right of self-governance is at stake.
Nothing short of a movement that unites immigrant rights, voting rights
and civil rights together with aggressive anti-poverty measures and an
overhauling of “free trade” and foreign military policies is what shall
be demanded of us.
I’ve been saying this stuff for 18 months now and it is
good to hear someone else ( Greg Palast) say it for a change. Whether
your focus has been voting rights or immigrant rights or opposition to
the war(s), etc. please pause a moment to reflect on this thesis. We’ve
each made a few gains working separately. Think of how much more we
could accomplish working together.
Think of what we stand to lose if we don’t.
Evan