Please forward this to anybody you know who cares at all about fair labor practices and accurate and fair public elections.
An explosive Dan Rather report "Trouble With Touchscreens" will premiere on HDNet tomorrow (Tuesday) night. It features the history and problems of the ES&S iVotronic voting machine now used in 25 Pennsylvania counties, including Allegheny, Westmoreland, Butler, Beaver, Cambria, Centre, Chester, Luzerne, and more.
This is a "MUST WATCH" -- footage and interviews on the sweatshop in the Philippines where the iVotronics are made by near-slaves earning $2.15 to $2.50 per day! Problems with the machines are attributed to manufacturing conditions including 90-plus degree assembly areas with no air conditioning or even fans, and 50 dump truck loads of " cats, and rats, and snakes, and all types of debris" removed from a basement inventory area.
The preview opens with footage of Christine Jennings, the Democratic candidate who "lost" her Congressional race by less than 400 votes, with over 18,000 undervotes inexplicably missing in that contest on the ES&S iVotronic machines in Sarasota County, FL last fall.
This amazing report will air on HDNet tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 8 PM but will be repeated multiple times over the coming days and weeks. Link to schedule and other copies of the video preview: http://www.hd.net/danrather.html#
As the preview segment shows, ES&S has done offshore manufacturing via Pivot International, a contract product manufacturing company with headquarters in Lenexa, Kanas that uses manufacturing facilities in the Philippines (It also subcontracts work to China.)
"If you go into almost any plant in the non-developed countries of the Far East, you're going to see things that OSHA or EPA would shut down tomorrow," says Kirk Douglass, CEO of Pivot International, in a June 1, 2002 article in Industry Week. http://www.industryweek.com/CurrentArticles/asp/articles.asp? ArticleID=1262
Pivot International apparently has a Pittsburgh Connection. Kirk Douglass received a Masters of Science degree in Industrial Administration from CMU and then was connected to PPG, according to a 2001 article in Kansas City Small Business Monthly. The article says that it was while working in the Philippines for part of PPG's Biomedical Systems Division that Douglass met the "Ching" character mentioned in Dan Rather's report, and apparently the two of them subsequently bought the makings of Pivot International from PPG:
Why, why, WHY did so so many of our supposedly pro-union officials vote to buy these sweatshop-made machines, including Democrats like Dan Onorato, John DeFazio, and others?
Labor day is coming up soon.
WE CAN & MUST GET THIS INFORMATION & MESSAGE OUT.
Electronic voting without voter-verified paper ballots and audits of all elections is deadly dangerous to our democracy. And it is pretty darn inhuman when it comes to fair labor practices as well.
Like everything designed for profit they were designed to fail. Who cares if they do not work, some do. So what if they are grossly inaccurate as long as you profit from it. If you get a government contract just keep plugging away, the money is yours. Spread the manufacturing process all over the world so no one can easily trace the problems. Make it hard for accountability to actually work. This is the new paradigm in business. Get the money and run.
by
cluelessfl (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 184 comments)
on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 11:11:20 AM
1 comments
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