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Comments on Greg Palast's New Book Armed Madhouse
By Stephen Lendman (about the author) Page 3 of 4 page(s)
Greg did a great job investigating the Rebublican high jinks in 2000 and did it again in the 2004 election. From what he learned then and since, he predicts 2008 will be a repeat of the same with maybe some new tricks thrown in but yielding the same result. He begins his account of the heist with a section titled - "Night of the Uncounted: How to Disappear Three Million Votes. The main battleground was Ohio where 153,237 supposedly "spoiled" or unreadable, damaged or invalid ballots were tossed out and never counted. The same tactic was repeated at least in New Mexico and Iowa. In all, over 3 million votes were cast but never counted. Here's how he broke it all down:
Provisional ballots rejected -
This was a whole new category of ballot that totaled 1,090,729 uncounted votes.
Spoiled Ballots -
These were votes bad machines failed to record: a total of 1,389,231 thrown out.
Absentee Ballots Uncounted -
These ballots were heavily used, especially in certain states. An astonishing 526,420 were rejected mostly in swing states where they counted most.
Voters Barred from Voting
Greg explained this category included a "combination of incompetence and trickery" that included eliminating polling stations in opponents' districts, creating long lines and purging supposed felons and others whose only crime was wanting to "Vote While Black." Greg didn't have a total here but estimated it was in the hundreds of thousands.
Greg then went on to present in great detail the results of his thorough investigation. Its conclusion helps show why half the voters never bother showing up on election day in the first place and those who do and think their vote counts are quite mistaken. The votes from the well-off in white (Republican) neighborhoods or counties surely do, but the game plan is to play fast and loose when it comes to people of color in strongly Democrat areas and use every dirty trick a clever mind can invent to deny them their franchise.
So far it's working so well Greg believes the plans are set on how the 2008 election will be stolen. Its centerpiece in Greg's estimation involves disenfranchizing Latino voters because it's clear to this large and growing segment of the population that the Republicans have no interest in serving them. How right they are. So that being the case, the solution is to keep them from voting for the opposition or simply not let them vote at all. It looks like they have a hat full of dirty tricks in mind to pull it off - some of the old standbys from 00 and 04 plus some new ones that will make it more interesting for journalists like Greg. One "reform" involves requiring a photo ID supposedly to be able to prevent someone from trying to vote illegally using someone else's name - something that never, if fact, happens. Greg ran the idea of voters doing this by a get-out-the vote organizer in New Mexico who complained how hard it was to get people out to vote once, let alone twice.
But the idea behind this scam is to throw up another obstacle to make it even harder for poor people of color to vote. If they don't have a driver's license, it will cost them about $20 for a voter ID card. They may not want to spend the cash for a privilege that won't count for much anyway, but it they're willing to they still need an ID to get an ID. The idea is to discourage the wrong voters from voting and if they manage to do it then make it easier to toss out their vote because they didn't do it right. To sell this idea, Republicans needed Democrats to go along and a key one to endorse it. They found their man in Jimmy Carter (a member of the privileged class in good standing) who served on an Election Reform Commission that recommended a mandatory national voter ID card. We'll have to wait a couple of years to see how all this plays out. But with the past two elections as backdrop, it's hard not to imagine more "fun and games" in 2008.
Greg also makes another key point he believes is accurate although I'm not as sure about it as he is - the role of electronic voting machines and their possible or likely manipulation to rig the 2004 vote. Greg called this issue a "head fake" despite the fact that Bush supporters made, programmed and serviced the machines and most of them offered no voter printouts for verification. I was suspicious the first time I heard about them and still am. Any smart programmer can make my vote come out twice for the other candidate, and I have trouble believing it didn't happen often enough to matter. But Greg feels otherwise and reported this issue was brought up and highlighted enough to divert peoples' attention away from where the real mischief was happening. He may be right, and if so, it certainly would not have been the first time. The folks who run the empire have had lots of practice doing it and are very clever coming up with whatever tactics they need to complete the job they set out to do.
Chapter Five - The Class War - The Great and Growing Divide between the Rich and the Rest of Us
The divide is great and worsening as wealth is systematically sucked from the poor and middle class and transferred to the rich. It's the Bush administration's notion of an "ownership" society where the rich own it and the rest of us pay for it. I've documented the downward trajectory of American workers in a major article I wrote called Hostile Takeover. It was about how giant corporations run the world and control our lives, how the rich have benefitted greatly, especially since the Reagan years in the 1980s, and how most people have seen an unprecedented fall in their standard of living over that same time. Adjusted for inflation, the average working person in the US now earns less than 30 years ago despite the fact that economic growth has been strong and worker productivity high. But the gains from it have gone to the top as clearly seen in the following numbers. In 2004, the average CEO earned 431 times the income of the average working person. That was up from 85 times in 1990 and 42 times in 1980.
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