Election Illusions
Election Illusions
By Harry Braun
Chairman, PhoenixProjectPac.
US President Bush was selected, not elected, for his first term in office, and his reelection cannot be verified by anyone because the software for the computerized voting machines was programmed in secret by his corporate political friends -- and computer software fraud is virtually impossible to detect. Exit polls have always been accurate in the past, and there is no reason why large numbers of voters would lie in an exit poll. The exit polls in key states like Ohio showed Kerry ahead by several points, but the computers came up with a Bush win. This is especially curious because a post election national poll taken by CBS News and The New York Times(January 20, 2005), confirmed that 53 percent of those surveyed did not think the war in Iraq was worth the loss of life; a whopping 75 percent thought Bush had no clear plan for getting out of Iraq; and only 36 percent thought the economy would improve under his leadership, which makes his reelection all the more puzzling. It is why if the reelection of Bush is to be valid, there needs to be a recount not with computers, but with paper ballots that can be counted and verified not in secret, but in full view ofcitizens and the media -- just like they do in Canada and most European countries.
The Bush administration and the American news media have hailed the election in Iraq as some major achievement, but it was not a democratic election that would allow the Iraqi public to elect its leaders directly,or determine whether the U.S. armed forces should stay in Iraq. Rather, it was a complicated republican system of representation that will only allow a tiny number of people to write a constitution and elect a prime minister, which the Bush administration assumes will rubber stamp the decisions to allow American and British oil corporations to exploit Iraq’s multi-trillion dollar oil resources. The Iraqi election is an attempt to put “an Iraqi face” on an imperial corporate occupation, and as such, it will do little or nothing to quell the insurgency that grows stronger day by day.
Since no weapons of mass-destruction were found, George Bush now speaks of supporting freedom and democracy in Iraq and around the world, but he does not promote having a democracy in America. His Orwellian doublespeak really refers to setting up republics, not a democracies, which will provide multinational corporations with the same “freedom” to bribe the foreign governmental officials as easily as they do the ones in the U.S., where industry lobbyists write the bills that the Members of Congress pass without even reading.
Most Americans believe America is a democracy because the terms “republic” and “democracy” have become synonymous with one another, when in fact they are fundamentally very different forms ofgovernment. Democracies are ruled by the many, and republics are ruled by the tiny few, usually committee chairman who operate in secret, which is why republics are so easy to corrupt. Thomas Friedman recently wrote in The New York Times (January 20, 2005) that “the pervading view on in Europe is “shock and awe” that Americans actually reelected Bush.” The following week (January 27th) Friedman wrote that “Bush is more widely and deeply disliked than any president inhistory,” but his explanation was that “Europeans dislike Bush so intensely because they love to make fun of naïve American optimism, but deep down, they envy it and they want America to be that open, foreigner-embracing, carefree, goofily enthusiastic place that cynical old Europe can never be.”
I suspect that most Europeans would be highly offended at Mr. Friedman’sviews, which totally ignore the fact that the Bush administration flagrantly violated international law when it ordered the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq so it could undertake a brutal military invasion that has destroyed Iraq’s priceless libraries, artifacts and museums, as well as its infrastructure to provide security, electricity, fresh water and sewage treatment. Bush said the war was over weapons of mass-destruction, but the primary military objectives were to secure the oil wells, and the only building in Baghdad that was protected from the looters by American military forces was the oil ministry building. It’s not America’s “goofily enthusiastic optimism” that bothers critics of the Bush administration, it’s the fact that Bush used forged documents and lies to undertake apolicy of mass-murder and destruction that reduced the cradle ofcivilization to rubble for oil.
The burning of the library of Alexandriain 400 BC by the Roman army palls in comparison to the massive war crimes against a country that never attacked the U.S., which Bush now says he committed in the name of freedom and democracy. No one in the Bush administration or the electronic news media have informed the American public that Saddam’s Baath party was put into power in Iraq by the CIA in a bloody coup during the Kennedy administration. Nor have they mentioned that Saddam was a primary American ally in the MiddleEast with the next five American presidents, including President Reagan who substantially increased aid to Iraq in order to assist Saddam in his war against the Iranians. Saddam was indeed a brutal dictator, but he was“made in the USA,” just like the long list of other dictators that the U.S.government has supported around the world for the past 50 years.
Saddam responded by making Iraq the only secular country in the Middle East, where women were treated as equals with men, and before he invaded Kuwait, Saddam personally received permission for the invasion from the U.S. Ambassador inIraq at the time, April Gillespie. Bush Senior obviously changed his mind and subsequently launched the first Gulf War to force Saddam out of Kuwait,and now George Bush Jr. has squandered over $300 billion of deficit-financed dollars on an illegal and unnecessary invasion that has poisoned America’s image worldwide, and given new meaning to the term “Ugly American.”
Corporate Energy Wars
The real reason for the war was the corporate profits of the major oilcompanies, as well as Halliburton and other American “privatized” corporate contractors, which received billions of deficit-financed tax dollars insecret, no bid, cost-plus contracts, which should be illegal. If that were not bad enough, the American occupation authority (NY Times, January 31,2005) that governed Iraq until mid-2004, cannot account for $8.8 billion ofIraq’s money that was seized. According to the Special Inspector Generalfor Iraqi Reconstruction, the Coalition Provisional Authority did not establish any financial controls, or transparency as to where the money, in U.S. cash, really went. In one example, one ministry supposedly received money to pay 8,206 guards, but only 602 guards were on station at the ministry.
Billions more of Iraq’s cash reserves were spent by the American authorities to pay for corporate contractors and overpriced fuel purchased from Halliburton. U.S. solders understandably want to believe that their comrades are dieing for something important, but the sad truth is that they are fighting and dying not for democracy but for the imperial corporate control of Iraq.
Cheney’s fever for the war is easy to understand. He spent the bulk of his professional career privatizing the Department of Defense so that companies like Halliburton would make billions in a war. And if the war went badly,Halliburton would make even more money with its cost-plus contracts. The American news media ignores these brutal realities and act as cheerleaders for the invasion. There are potentially trillions of dollars of oil in Iraq, which is why 14 American military bases have now been created inIraq, and why the Bush administration has no intentions of “cutting andrunning.” Bush and Cheney intend to use the America’s military to secureIraq’s oil regardless of how many people have to be killed and injured, or how much of Iraq has to be destroyed in the process.
Instead of invading Iraq, the U.S. should have been leading the world in shifting from oil and other fossil and nuclear fuels to a solar hydrogen economy with wartime speed. According to investigative reports published in The New York Times (February 24, 2004), the major oil fields in SaudiArabia are now more than 50 years old; their production output peaked in2000; and it is now declining at roughly 10 percent per year. The lifecycle of an oil well follows the classical “bell curve,” and the 10 percent decline number tells us that the Saudi oil fields are similar to a rollercoaster that has just crested the first major ramp, and soon an“exponential plunge” will occur, which will impact the global financial markets like a “financial tsunami.”
Even worse, the most recent large-scale computer simulation of the global climate has documented that an 11 degree C increase in ambient temperatures is inevitable if our addiction to fossil fuels continues. According toLester R. Brown, an award-winning environmental analyst and president ofthe Earth Policy Institute, studies have documented that if surface temperatures increase 11 degrees, seed federalization rates go from 100 percent to 0. That means every major agricultural system will fail, which will result in chaos and panic as billions of people starve to death. Grain reserves in the U.S. are at the lowest levels since records have been kept, and according to scientific studies published in the journal Nature(May 15, 2003), over 90 percent of the ocean ecosystems have already been destroyed by unregulated free market forces that are hunting the remaining fish into extinction. Moreover, the remaining 10 percent of the fish are so contaminated with mercury from coal burning power plants they are unfit to eat in any case.
While the Bush administration distracts the media with a plan to further drive the U.S. into debt by trying to privatize social security, his unprecedented deficits have already caused the dollar’s value to decrease by over 30 percent against the Euro since he took office, and there is no end in sight. Instead of raising taxes to pay for his “elective” war, Bush simply passed along the costs to our children’s children’s children. And that’s not even the worst part. Bush talks about family values, but he has allowed over 40,000 megawatts of old coal plants to continue to emit tons of mercury annually, which poisons the air, water and food, and ultimately millions of our own people with devastating and permanent brain damage, cancer, heart attacks, strokes and lung disease. Even more serious is the fact that the Bush administration has secretly covered up the nuclear plant corrosion and nuclear waste problems, and some of the isotopes, such as Iodine 129, will be leaking and spreading genetic mutations, disease and death for the next 160 million years. Such immorality is incomprehensible and unprecedented in human history, yet no one in the media even discusses the issue. Bush fiddles while America burns.
The ultra-conservative free market fanatics, including Ronald Reagan, havet ransformed America from the greatest industrial power in the world, to what is now similar to a Third World country, which is hopelessly in debt, exporting raw materials, and importing finished products -- mostly fromChina, which ignores our intellectual property and is allowed to steal the U.S. blind. China is the principal country that has benefited from the free market because no one can compete with its slave labor conditions and lack of environmental quality. Ralph Nader has talked for 30 years about how the wealthy interests and corporations run the U.S. Congress like a house of prostitution, and no one of substance disputes this unfortunate fact. As retiring Senator Fritz Hollings stated, he had to raise $30,000 every week if he was to have enough money to stay in office, which means he spent most of his time meeting with individuals or corporations who can afford to write large checks.
Constitutional Amendments
The current republican system of government in the U.S. is so hopelessly corrupt that only a series of constitutional amendments can resolve the problem. Amendments that will end fraudulent elections and government secrecy and transform America into a real democracy. Amendments that will require balanced budgets and true and fair accounting systems that will factor in environmental, health care, social and military costs of products.
A more detailed discussion of these proposed amendments can be found on thePhoenixProjectPac.US website, but the first step is to organize aConstitutional Convention in Washington D.C. where each of the proposed amendments can be debated and discussed by the American people, who will ultimately be responsible for directing their state legislatures to approve the amendments.
Given the exponential nature of the energy, economic and environmental problems, we are as close to an nanotechnology utopia of molecular biology and designer genes, as we are to an ecological oblivionof mass-starvation and death. It is why we on Spaceship Earth are like passengers on the Titanic and there is only a limited amount of time left to change course before the laws of physics make such a “transition of substance” impossible. The key is public awareness and citizen action.
Phoenix Project Pac.US
Finishing the American Revolution
6128 North 28th Street, Phoenix, Arizona 85016
Telephone: 602-977-0888 Fax: 602-955-5444
Email: info@PhoenixProjectPac.US
By Harry Braun
Chairman, PhoenixProjectPac.
US President Bush was selected, not elected, for his first term in office, and his reelection cannot be verified by anyone because the software for the computerized voting machines was programmed in secret by his corporate political friends -- and computer software fraud is virtually impossible to detect. Exit polls have always been accurate in the past, and there is no reason why large numbers of voters would lie in an exit poll. The exit polls in key states like Ohio showed Kerry ahead by several points, but the computers came up with a Bush win. This is especially curious because a post election national poll taken by CBS News and The New York Times(January 20, 2005), confirmed that 53 percent of those surveyed did not think the war in Iraq was worth the loss of life; a whopping 75 percent thought Bush had no clear plan for getting out of Iraq; and only 36 percent thought the economy would improve under his leadership, which makes his reelection all the more puzzling. It is why if the reelection of Bush is to be valid, there needs to be a recount not with computers, but with paper ballots that can be counted and verified not in secret, but in full view ofcitizens and the media -- just like they do in Canada and most European countries.
The Bush administration and the American news media have hailed the election in Iraq as some major achievement, but it was not a democratic election that would allow the Iraqi public to elect its leaders directly,or determine whether the U.S. armed forces should stay in Iraq. Rather, it was a complicated republican system of representation that will only allow a tiny number of people to write a constitution and elect a prime minister, which the Bush administration assumes will rubber stamp the decisions to allow American and British oil corporations to exploit Iraq’s multi-trillion dollar oil resources. The Iraqi election is an attempt to put “an Iraqi face” on an imperial corporate occupation, and as such, it will do little or nothing to quell the insurgency that grows stronger day by day.
Since no weapons of mass-destruction were found, George Bush now speaks of supporting freedom and democracy in Iraq and around the world, but he does not promote having a democracy in America. His Orwellian doublespeak really refers to setting up republics, not a democracies, which will provide multinational corporations with the same “freedom” to bribe the foreign governmental officials as easily as they do the ones in the U.S., where industry lobbyists write the bills that the Members of Congress pass without even reading.
Most Americans believe America is a democracy because the terms “republic” and “democracy” have become synonymous with one another, when in fact they are fundamentally very different forms ofgovernment. Democracies are ruled by the many, and republics are ruled by the tiny few, usually committee chairman who operate in secret, which is why republics are so easy to corrupt. Thomas Friedman recently wrote in The New York Times (January 20, 2005) that “the pervading view on in Europe is “shock and awe” that Americans actually reelected Bush.” The following week (January 27th) Friedman wrote that “Bush is more widely and deeply disliked than any president inhistory,” but his explanation was that “Europeans dislike Bush so intensely because they love to make fun of naïve American optimism, but deep down, they envy it and they want America to be that open, foreigner-embracing, carefree, goofily enthusiastic place that cynical old Europe can never be.”
I suspect that most Europeans would be highly offended at Mr. Friedman’sviews, which totally ignore the fact that the Bush administration flagrantly violated international law when it ordered the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq so it could undertake a brutal military invasion that has destroyed Iraq’s priceless libraries, artifacts and museums, as well as its infrastructure to provide security, electricity, fresh water and sewage treatment. Bush said the war was over weapons of mass-destruction, but the primary military objectives were to secure the oil wells, and the only building in Baghdad that was protected from the looters by American military forces was the oil ministry building. It’s not America’s “goofily enthusiastic optimism” that bothers critics of the Bush administration, it’s the fact that Bush used forged documents and lies to undertake apolicy of mass-murder and destruction that reduced the cradle ofcivilization to rubble for oil.
The burning of the library of Alexandriain 400 BC by the Roman army palls in comparison to the massive war crimes against a country that never attacked the U.S., which Bush now says he committed in the name of freedom and democracy. No one in the Bush administration or the electronic news media have informed the American public that Saddam’s Baath party was put into power in Iraq by the CIA in a bloody coup during the Kennedy administration. Nor have they mentioned that Saddam was a primary American ally in the MiddleEast with the next five American presidents, including President Reagan who substantially increased aid to Iraq in order to assist Saddam in his war against the Iranians. Saddam was indeed a brutal dictator, but he was“made in the USA,” just like the long list of other dictators that the U.S.government has supported around the world for the past 50 years.
Saddam responded by making Iraq the only secular country in the Middle East, where women were treated as equals with men, and before he invaded Kuwait, Saddam personally received permission for the invasion from the U.S. Ambassador inIraq at the time, April Gillespie. Bush Senior obviously changed his mind and subsequently launched the first Gulf War to force Saddam out of Kuwait,and now George Bush Jr. has squandered over $300 billion of deficit-financed dollars on an illegal and unnecessary invasion that has poisoned America’s image worldwide, and given new meaning to the term “Ugly American.”
Corporate Energy Wars
The real reason for the war was the corporate profits of the major oilcompanies, as well as Halliburton and other American “privatized” corporate contractors, which received billions of deficit-financed tax dollars insecret, no bid, cost-plus contracts, which should be illegal. If that were not bad enough, the American occupation authority (NY Times, January 31,2005) that governed Iraq until mid-2004, cannot account for $8.8 billion ofIraq’s money that was seized. According to the Special Inspector Generalfor Iraqi Reconstruction, the Coalition Provisional Authority did not establish any financial controls, or transparency as to where the money, in U.S. cash, really went. In one example, one ministry supposedly received money to pay 8,206 guards, but only 602 guards were on station at the ministry.
Billions more of Iraq’s cash reserves were spent by the American authorities to pay for corporate contractors and overpriced fuel purchased from Halliburton. U.S. solders understandably want to believe that their comrades are dieing for something important, but the sad truth is that they are fighting and dying not for democracy but for the imperial corporate control of Iraq.
Cheney’s fever for the war is easy to understand. He spent the bulk of his professional career privatizing the Department of Defense so that companies like Halliburton would make billions in a war. And if the war went badly,Halliburton would make even more money with its cost-plus contracts. The American news media ignores these brutal realities and act as cheerleaders for the invasion. There are potentially trillions of dollars of oil in Iraq, which is why 14 American military bases have now been created inIraq, and why the Bush administration has no intentions of “cutting andrunning.” Bush and Cheney intend to use the America’s military to secureIraq’s oil regardless of how many people have to be killed and injured, or how much of Iraq has to be destroyed in the process.
Instead of invading Iraq, the U.S. should have been leading the world in shifting from oil and other fossil and nuclear fuels to a solar hydrogen economy with wartime speed. According to investigative reports published in The New York Times (February 24, 2004), the major oil fields in SaudiArabia are now more than 50 years old; their production output peaked in2000; and it is now declining at roughly 10 percent per year. The lifecycle of an oil well follows the classical “bell curve,” and the 10 percent decline number tells us that the Saudi oil fields are similar to a rollercoaster that has just crested the first major ramp, and soon an“exponential plunge” will occur, which will impact the global financial markets like a “financial tsunami.”
Even worse, the most recent large-scale computer simulation of the global climate has documented that an 11 degree C increase in ambient temperatures is inevitable if our addiction to fossil fuels continues. According toLester R. Brown, an award-winning environmental analyst and president ofthe Earth Policy Institute, studies have documented that if surface temperatures increase 11 degrees, seed federalization rates go from 100 percent to 0. That means every major agricultural system will fail, which will result in chaos and panic as billions of people starve to death. Grain reserves in the U.S. are at the lowest levels since records have been kept, and according to scientific studies published in the journal Nature(May 15, 2003), over 90 percent of the ocean ecosystems have already been destroyed by unregulated free market forces that are hunting the remaining fish into extinction. Moreover, the remaining 10 percent of the fish are so contaminated with mercury from coal burning power plants they are unfit to eat in any case.
While the Bush administration distracts the media with a plan to further drive the U.S. into debt by trying to privatize social security, his unprecedented deficits have already caused the dollar’s value to decrease by over 30 percent against the Euro since he took office, and there is no end in sight. Instead of raising taxes to pay for his “elective” war, Bush simply passed along the costs to our children’s children’s children. And that’s not even the worst part. Bush talks about family values, but he has allowed over 40,000 megawatts of old coal plants to continue to emit tons of mercury annually, which poisons the air, water and food, and ultimately millions of our own people with devastating and permanent brain damage, cancer, heart attacks, strokes and lung disease. Even more serious is the fact that the Bush administration has secretly covered up the nuclear plant corrosion and nuclear waste problems, and some of the isotopes, such as Iodine 129, will be leaking and spreading genetic mutations, disease and death for the next 160 million years. Such immorality is incomprehensible and unprecedented in human history, yet no one in the media even discusses the issue. Bush fiddles while America burns.
The ultra-conservative free market fanatics, including Ronald Reagan, havet ransformed America from the greatest industrial power in the world, to what is now similar to a Third World country, which is hopelessly in debt, exporting raw materials, and importing finished products -- mostly fromChina, which ignores our intellectual property and is allowed to steal the U.S. blind. China is the principal country that has benefited from the free market because no one can compete with its slave labor conditions and lack of environmental quality. Ralph Nader has talked for 30 years about how the wealthy interests and corporations run the U.S. Congress like a house of prostitution, and no one of substance disputes this unfortunate fact. As retiring Senator Fritz Hollings stated, he had to raise $30,000 every week if he was to have enough money to stay in office, which means he spent most of his time meeting with individuals or corporations who can afford to write large checks.
Constitutional Amendments
The current republican system of government in the U.S. is so hopelessly corrupt that only a series of constitutional amendments can resolve the problem. Amendments that will end fraudulent elections and government secrecy and transform America into a real democracy. Amendments that will require balanced budgets and true and fair accounting systems that will factor in environmental, health care, social and military costs of products.
A more detailed discussion of these proposed amendments can be found on thePhoenixProjectPac.US website, but the first step is to organize aConstitutional Convention in Washington D.C. where each of the proposed amendments can be debated and discussed by the American people, who will ultimately be responsible for directing their state legislatures to approve the amendments.
Given the exponential nature of the energy, economic and environmental problems, we are as close to an nanotechnology utopia of molecular biology and designer genes, as we are to an ecological oblivionof mass-starvation and death. It is why we on Spaceship Earth are like passengers on the Titanic and there is only a limited amount of time left to change course before the laws of physics make such a “transition of substance” impossible. The key is public awareness and citizen action.
Phoenix Project Pac.US
Finishing the American Revolution
6128 North 28th Street, Phoenix, Arizona 85016
Telephone: 602-977-0888 Fax: 602-955-5444
Email: info@PhoenixProjectPac.US
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 10:18 AM
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