[Marxism] The Most Recent Stolen election

["Craven, Jim" <JCraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

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"Hitler had gone to the meeting with his mind made up on two objectives
which he intended henceforth to pursue. One was to concentrate all power
in his own hands. The other was to re-establish the Nazi Party as a
political organization which would seek power exclusively through
constitutional means. He had explained the new tactics to one of his
henchmen Karl Ludeke, while still in prison: 'When I resume active work
it will be necessaary to pursue a new policy. Instead of working to
achieve power by armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter
the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If outvoting
them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the result will be
guaranteed by their own constitution. Any lawful process is
slow...Sooner or later we shall have the majority--and after that
Germany.' On his release from Landsberg, he had assured the Bavarian
Premier that the Nazi Party would henceforth act within the framework of
the constitution.


But he allowed himself to be carried away with the enthusiasm of the
crowd in his appearance at the Buergerbraukeller on February 27. His
threats against the State were scarcely veiled. The republican regime,
as well as the Marxists and the Jews, was 'the enemy'. And in his
peroration he had shouted: 'To this struggle of ours there are only two
possible issues: either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over
theirs!' " ("The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer,
30th Anniversary Edition, Fawcett-Cress Publishers, N.Y. 1992, pp
169-170)

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There is a saying in Malayalam (usually in response to the question "is
this correct or true?" by someone who does not think something is
correct or true): "If the crow takes a bath, can it become a swan?" The
answer is always no.
 

Behind this last fraud (all elections have been frauds since the
beginning of the so-called "Republic") was textbook "Bush's Brain" or
Karl Rove. The phony leaflets in Black Counties saying "Allegheny
Election Board" announcing that voters may vote on either Nov 2nd or 3rd
at their convenience. The Diebold machines in Ohio that arrived
programmed with a negative 25 million votes. The thousands of democrat
voter registrations thrown into dumpsters in Nevada and Oregon. The few
voting machines in Black districts that resulted in 7-hour waiting to
vote coupled with more than ample voting machines in Republican
districts with no waiting to vote. The wholesale intimidations of Latino
voters in New Mexico. The slashing of tires of republican vans for
taking elderly to the polls made to look like it was democrats who did
it (so as to have some balance to the myriad stories of fascist and
anti-democratic machinations of the republicans). The 30 counties in
Florida using Diebold machine with no paper trail that routinely broke
down or wouldn't start up.

The good news for Marxists is that it doesn't really matter--Kerry or
Bush. It is the system that is the issue and ultimately Bush will do for
capitalism what the movies Jaws I,II and III did for ocean bathing.

Jim Craven

 

>From Greg Palast:

The best person in the entire U.S. on U.S. elections is Greg Palast
(*Best Democracy Money can Buy*), cited for example by Paul Krugman of
the *New York Times* before this current election. Here is Palast's
statement this

morning:

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=391&row=0
<http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=391&row=0> 

"KERRY WON.

Here's the facts

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But
I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage
called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most
votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was
John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll
showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53% to 47%. Kerry also
defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51% to 49%. Unless a third gender
voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

Get the full story in the next hour on TomPaine.com. A special Greg
Palast invesigation."


Kerry Won. . .


Greg Palast


November 04, 2004


 <http://i.tompaine.com/images/spacer.gif> 

<http://www.tompaine.com/action/respond/>
<http://www.tompaine.com/print/kerry_won_.php>
<http://www.tompaine.com/action/sendtofriend/>  

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. In the United States, about 3 percent of
votes cast are voided-known as "spoilage" in election jargon-because the
ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and
studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio's discarded
ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the
Cleveland Plain Dealer reports
<http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1099
56457262001.xml>  there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in
Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional
ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be
tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.

Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the
manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The
documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times
bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this
month on DVD <http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm>  .

Kerry won. Here are  the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad.
But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage
called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most
votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was
John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m.
Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio
women by 53 percent to 47 percent.  The exit polls were later combined
with-and therefore contaminated by-the tabulated results, ultimately
becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. [To read about the
skewing of exit polls to conform to official results, click here
<http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/0
00922.php>  .] Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51
percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took
the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters
ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial,
question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio
punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply
not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See
TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten,"
<http://www.tompaine.com/articles/an_election_spoiled_rotten.php>
November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry
to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot
tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something
called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of
the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head
boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49
percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United
States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The
television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

Whose Votes Are Discarded?

And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official
report, come from African-American and minority precincts. (To learn
more, click here
<http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/electoral_reform/res
idual_ballot.php> .)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality
of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's
because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded
179,855 spoiled votes.  In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost
were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through
completely-leaving a 'hanging chad,'-or was punched extra times.  Whose
cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for
the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the
dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission, click here
<http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2004/elect04.pdf>  .)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots
thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's
election) will have been cast by African American and other minority
citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last
time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the
not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are
they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be
discerned.

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling
punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth
Blackwell, wrote before the election
<http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/electoral_reform/res
idual_ballot.php> , "the possibility of a close election with punch
cards as the state's primary voting device invites a Florida-like
calamity."

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up
to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating
Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine
Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in
Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's
office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm.
But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a
democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical
loss-that's 110,000 votes-overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't
punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.'
That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku
Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color
at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for
poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws-almost never
used-allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters
and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and
federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the
challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand
in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there.
Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional"
ballots-a kind of voting placebo-which may or may not be counted.
Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your
number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these
are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled
punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the
totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a
new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality-if all votes are
counted-is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I
wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico,
though not one ballot has yet been counted."

How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional
ballots.

CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network
total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of
ballots cast.

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent,
votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor
precincts-Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same
ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage
bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in
the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five
times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting
these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the
election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic
areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in
the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic
population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush
"won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he
told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated
that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of
candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the
desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional
ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee
Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who
got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the
Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor
Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the
iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots,
rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling
stations when there was the least question about a voter's
identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry-if we count all the
votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the
leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again.
Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the
spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's
Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled
and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into
Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a
full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would
punish the party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the
shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count
under PATRIOT Act III.

I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several
friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the
failure-a second time-to count all the votes, that won't be necessary.
My country has left me.

 <http://i.tompaine.com/images/spacer.gif> 

 
 
 
James M. Craven
Blackfoot Name: Omahkohkiaayo-i'poyi
Professor/Consultant,Economics;Business Division Chair
Clark College, 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd.
Vancouver, WA. USA 98663
Tel: (360) 992-2283; Fax: (360) 992-2863
http://www.aradicalblackfoot.blogspot.com
<http://www.aradicalblackfoot.blogspot.com/>  
"Naturally, the common people don't want war ... 
it is always a simple matter to drag the people 
along...the people can always be brought to the 
bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have 
to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and 
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and 
exposing the country to danger. It works the same 
in every country." 
(Hermann Goering, No. 2 Nazi in "Third Reich")
Employer has no association with private/protected opinion
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