[Marxism] The political bubble: more profits in the most expensive election in history

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

There are huge sums being spent on the US elections. The Democratic and
Republican parties together have received at least $370 million in explicit
political donations during the 2004 election cycle.

Microsoft, its political action committee and employees have contributed
some $11.4 million to federal candidates and party committees since 1999.
During that time, 55 percent of Microsoft's money went to Republicans, but
Democrats have collected 58 percent of the company's contributions for 2004.

Employees of the eight top weapons manufacturers in the USA (Textron,
Lockheed Martin, General Electric, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon,
McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman) have contributed around $1.4 million
for 2004 in political donations so far, both to Democrats and Republicans,
which is more than the Teamsters union. The National Rifle Association, for
another example, has given $3 million in political donations between 1998
and 2002, of which 80% to Republicans.

Actually, there are at least 22 corporations having a bob each way, making
campaign donations to both Democrats and Republicans (see
http://www.capitaleye.org/DemConventionDualDonors.7.23.04.asp ). When the
mayor of Boston and Ted Kennedy called on Boston-based athletic shoe company
New Balance to help the city bring the 2004 Democratic National Convention
to Beantown, company officials reportedly coughed up more than $1 million.
Later, the mayor of New York City called and asked New Balance to contribute
for the Republican convention, and New Balance reportedly gave another
$500,000 to the New York host committee. The company's chairman and CEO, Jim
Davis, contributed $113,500 to Republican federal candidates and party
committees since 1999 and $9,500 to Democrats.

The upcoming presidential election is a money-spinner in many other ways.
According to Gallup, two-thirds of Americans say they have given "quite a
lot" of thought to the upcoming presidential election. Voter enthusiasm and
political interest is at an historic high, and this generates a demand for
all sorts of political commodities. Thus, for example, in the bestseller
lists, books like Clinton's autobiography, Byrd's "Losing America", and
"Imperial Hubris" are selling like hotcakes, along with the official 9/11
Commission report. Nevertheless almost 60% of Americans said they haven't
seen advertisements from Bush, Kerry or any of the interest groups that
support them since Super Tuesday, according to a study of TV campaign
advertising by Nielsen Monitor-Plus and the University of Wisconsin
Advertising Project.

But it goes a lot further than that of course. The site
http://www.tradesports.com/ (domiciled in Dublin, Ireland) shows
how to make money out of "US election futures". At www.smartmoney.com they
explain how this works. The most actively traded futures contract is the
contract on George Bush winning the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Right
now that contract trades an average daily volume valued at about $1 million.
"The day after the November elections, the contract will expire. It will be
priced at 100 points if Bush is reelected, and zero if he is not - and 100
points equals $10 per contract. As of this writing, it's trading at 71. If
you bought the contract at 71, and Bush is reelected, you'd make 29 points
(because then the contract would expire at a value of 100). Those 29 points
represent $2.90 per $10 contract - so if you had bought 1000 contracts your
total profit would be $2,900. Of course, as in any futures market, for every
buyer there has to be a seller. Or more precisely, for every long there has
to be a short. In this example, the short would lose 29 points, or $2.90 per
contract. But suppose Bush loses. Then the contract would expire at a value
of zero, so the long would lose $7.10 per contract, and the short would gain
$7.10 per contract. By the way, both sides pay a commission of 4 cents per
contract for every trade."

As regards the voting machinery, Diebold Inc. Chief Executive Wally O'Dell
proclaimed in May 2002 that "We will definitely be the largest [electronic]
voting machine company in the world this year." This was after a Diebold
subsidiary landed a contract for the first statewide electronic voting
system in Georgia. Revenues from the supply of voting machines are expected
to total around $150-$170 million in 2004. About 103,000 voting machines are
in use in the USA at present.

However, not all is well. Walden W. O'Dell, Diebold's chairman and chief
executive officer, was criticized in August 2003 for having a $1,000-a-plate
Republican fund-raiser at his suburban Columbus home. In a letter inviting
people to attend, O'Dell said he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the president next year."

Meanwhile, almost all the electronic records from touch-screen voting in
Miami-Dade County were lost, stoking previous concerns that the machines are
unreliable and open to abuse. State and county officials in California were
likewise dismayed to learn last year that Diebold altered the software
running in Alameda County's machines, yet neither submitted it for state
testing nor even notified state authorities of the change. In Georgia,
Diebold election officials in Macon last year apparently forgot to program
the election computers to accept more than one write-in candidate.

Rice University computer scientist Dan Wallach associated with
www.verifiedvoting.org reported to CBS recently that "We found a number of
interesting flaws with the Diebold system, any one of which could allow
somebody to corrupt an election." During a test, it took only seconds for
Michael Wertheimer and a team of former National Security Agency experts to
break into Diebold voting machines in Maryland. "It is definitely within the
realm of possibility, strong possibility, that an election could be thrown
and nobody would know," says Wertheimer. They picked locks, reprogrammed
machines - and the so-called smart cards given to voters - allowing them to
change votes or to vote as often as they liked. Diebold apparently knew
about three years ago, according to a disclosed internal e-mail: "Our smart
card format has absolutely no security .. They could stand at the ballot
station and quietly burn new cards all day."

It's ingenious really. Get the whole country divided evenly between two
candidates, and it sends half a billion dollars spinning around. Whatever
the outcome may be, and however dodgy the computers will be, one thing is
certain. A lot of people make a lot of money out of it.

PS: as regards the material basis of American politics, one other snippet:
in 1940, there were 4 million Americans working for government and 11
million working in manufacturing. Nowadays there are 21.5 million Americans
working for government, and 14.5 million in manufacturing. There are now
68,000 pages of regulations in the US Federal Register and there are 17,000
pages of US tax legislation. Annual US federal taxation is equal in size to
the annual Gross Domestic Product of the Russian Federation, but the Russian
Federation has consistently had a proportionally smaller bureaucracy and
greater socio-economic equality (according to Goskomstat, in 1996 the
wealthiest 10 percent of Russians earned only 12.8 times as much as the
poorest 10 percent).

The single largest spender of federal tax funds in the USA ? The Department
of Defence.

Jurriaan












Jurriaan



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