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COULD HAVE solved this problem, or started us well on the road to solving it (--the problem described above, of U.S. legitimacy, of democratic and humanitarian values, and of adherence to international law and restraint in the use of force, but effective force in cooperation with others, when needed), but SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG with our democratic system--to prevent this course correction--and you don't have to look far to know what it is. It's staring us in the face.
In the same month as the Iraq War Resolution--October 2002--the Anthrax Congress passed a closely related bill, but one that was kept under the radar: the "Help America Vote Act"--engineered by the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress, with DLC 'Democrats' in collusion (chief among them, Christopher Dodd), which appropriated a $3.9 billion electronic voting boondoggle, to fast-track electronic voting systems all over the country, run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit-recount controls. Non-transparent, corporate-controlled vote 'counting' thus spread across the country like a cancer, during the 2002 to 2004 period, corrupting everything in its path.
The IWR guaranteed unjust war; HAVA provided the means to shove the unjust war down the throats of the American people--56% of whom opposed the war from the beginning (Feb. '03), and a whopping 70% of whom oppose it now. Tell me how we got a Congress in '06 that ESCALATED the war, and larded Bush/Cheney with another $100 billion to keep killing Iraqis until they sign over their oil rights? It's a no-brainer. The warmongers, and fascists, and global corporate predators who rule over us are rigging the frigging voting machines!
They have the NEW ability to do this, without detection. Why on earth would we presume that they are not using it? --especially when there is such overwhelming evidence that they are?
'TRADE SECRET' vote counting is not the only thing wrong with our election system, but it is the 'coup de grace'--the final blow--that locks out change. The '06 elections were rigged in many ways--for instance, war profiteer/corporate money poured into the primaries to defeat antiwar candidates or prevent them from running--but with the fascists having the ADDED power to tweak election results in favor of war and corporate looting, wherever they need to, to shape the OVERALL Congress, grass roots activists don't have a chance. We can out-fundraise and out-GOTV the fascists--we are the majority!--but we can't do ANYTHING about "trade secret" code vote switching and 'disappeared' votes. We have lost our right to a transparent vote count.
Ask Christine Jennings--the Dem candidate in FL-13, in 2006. ES&S machines 'disappeared' 18,000 votes for Congress in Democratic areas, in an election 'won' by the Bushite (naturally) by only 350 or so votes. When Jennings' lawyers took the matter to court, and asked to review ES&S's programming code, to try to figure out what happened to those 18,0000 votes, ES&S REFUSED, and argued that their right to privately profit from our election system trumps the right of the voters to know how their votes are counted! And the judge agreed! And this so-called 'Democratic' Congress has done nothing about it--nothing!
Thus, less than a handful of global corporate predator e-voting corporations--Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia--can determine the OVERALL coloration of Congress, and can also reverse presidential outcomes (as they did in 2004). They don't have to steal every seat in Congress, but, for every real representative of the people who is genuinely elected (races in which the people would likely outvote the machines), they can tweak two or three close races--D or R, it doesn't matter--into the pro-war, pro-corporate column, and produce a Congress that does the exact reverse of the will of the people, on the war and other issues.
These lofty discussions of geopolitics, and our corrupt and traitorous political establishment's angst about their broken military, and loss of cache in the world, are all well and good. We do need such discussions. They are illuminating. But any such discussion that leaves out the measures that this political establishment has taken to PREVENT democratic change, and to thwart the will of the people, are fatally incomplete. We have to START with this realization: that our political establishment fucked us over, deliberately, methodically and sneakily taking away our right to vote.
One measure of this reality is that, now that Bush/Cheney have broken our military, our infrastructure, our economy and our reputation in the world, what is being done about it? NOTHING! The political establishment is floundering around--RE-FUNDING the war, giving Bush/Cheney more spying powers, failing to impeach them for an unprecedented list of "high crimes and misdemeanors," and CONTINUING to fuck up, on a scale I would never have thought imaginable (Congress this week provoking Turkey, last week provoking Iran--and permitting Bush/Cheney to provoke Russia, by putting nukes on their border, the kind of behavior that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962). A political establishment that has severed its connection to the will of the people will either veer far to the right ("strongman" power, fascist rule) or will flounder, as the 'Democrats' are doing--reeling from fascist excesses and unable to achieve focus and control.
The broken military, our shattered Constitution, our broken economy, and our catastrophic loss of prestige in the world are all directly attributable to stolen elections. They are NOT the result of some philosophical discussion in contending "think tanks" or corporate board rooms. They are the result of the deliberate disenfranchisement of the American people.
You can say all you want about the "Project for a New American Century"--the neo-con plan to invade Iraq and Iran and dominate the world, via a "Pearl Harbor"-type event (9/11). But the two most important factors in the implementation of that plan were Stolen Election I and Stolen Election II (2000 and 2004, and the continuation of the war with Stolen Election III in 2006). Without this PRACTICAL disempowerment of the American people, a) the Iraq War would not have happened in the first place, and b) if the Supreme Court crowning of Bush/Cheney in 2000, and the consequent invasion of Iraq, could not have been stopped, the 2004 election would have provided the remedy, had it not been stolen as well, primarily by the means installed between 2002 and 2004: 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting.
If the American people had their druthers, NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED. The bastards stole one election, through corruption of the Supreme Court (and, interestingly, with ES&S--the e-voting corp, brethren to Diebold--helping to set up that "hanging chad" business in Florida--see Dan Rather's "The Trouble with Touchscreens," at www.HD.net). Then they put in place a system in which we don't even have "hanging chads" to count. We don't even KNOW--and can't know, are not permitted to SEE--how the votes are counted. And they thus provided the foundation for Stolen Election II, in 2004, and a warmonger Congress in 2006.
And the ANSWER to the problem--the problem of the destruction of the U.S. of A.--is NOT some further "think tank"/corporate board room solution (such as is likely to be foisted upon us next year, with Emperor Hillary--a "liberal"-SEEMING regime that will, in fact, help the war profiteers and global corporate predators consolidate their enormous gains under Bush)--but rather an outbreak of DEMOCRACY in this country, focused on TRANSPARENT vote counting as priority no. 1. It's not going to save the country right away, but it will save the country eventually.
If you study a wide swath of polls over the last six years--issue polls, Bush-Cheney approval polls, etc.--you will be amazed at what you see: A huge peace-minded, justice-minded, progressive American majority that is far, far different from the America we see portrayed in the war profiteering corporate news monopolies. The polls tell the story--60% to 90% American disapproval of every Bush policy, foreign and domestic, over a long period of time. Americans have shown astonishing resistance to the relentless, 24/7 war propaganda and fascist brainwashing they have been subjected to. Give these people back their right to vote, and they WILL reform this country.
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