WAKEFULNESS IS BETTER THAN TV
politics
|
JIM CROW IN CYBERSPACE: The Unreported Story of How They Fixed the Vote in Florida --From the book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin 2003) by Greg Palast In the days following the presidential election, there were so many stories of African Americans erased from voter rolls you might think they were targeted by some kind of racial computer program. They were. I have a copy of it: two silvery CD-ROM disks right out of the office computers of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Once decoded and fed into a database, they make for interesting, if chilling, reading. They tell us how our president was elected-and it wasn't by the voters. Here's how it worked: Mostly, the disks contain data on Florida citizens-57,700 of them. In the months leading up to the November 2000 balloting, Florida Secretary of State Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local elections supervisors to purge these 57,700 from voter registries. In Harris's computers, they are named as felons who have no right to vote in Florida. Thomas Cooper is on the list: criminal scum, bad guy, felon, attempted voter. The Harris hit list says Cooper was convicted of a felony on January 30, 2007. 2007? You may suspect something's wrong with the list. You'd be right. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, over half-about 54 percent-are Black and Hispanic voters. Overwhelmingly, it is a list of Democrats. Secretary of State Harris declared George W. Bush winner of Florida, and thereby president, by a plurality of 537 votes over Al Gore. Now do the arithmetic. Over 50,000 voters wrongly targeted by the purge, mostly Blacks. My BBC researchers reported that Gore lost at least 22,000 votes as a result of this smart little blackbox operation. The first reports of this extraordinary discovery ran, as you'd expect, on page one of the country's leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the USA, it ran on page zero-the story was simply not covered in American newspapers. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also grabbed big television coverage. But again, it was the wrong continent: on BBC Television, broadcasting from London worldwide-everywhere, that is, but the USA. Was this some off-the-wall story
that the British press misreported? Hardly. The chief lawyer
for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard
evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise Florida's
Black voters. So why was this story investigated, reported and
broadcast only in Europe, for God's sake? I'd like to know the
answer. That way I could understand why a Southern California
ho'daddy like me has to commute to England with his wife and
kiddies to tell In this chapter, I take you along the path of the investigation, step by step, report by report, from false starts to unpretty conclusions. When I first broke the story, I had it wrong. Within weeks of the election, I said the Harris crew had tried to purge 8,000 voters. While that was enough to change the outcome of the election (and change history), I was way off. Now, after two years of peeling the Florida elections onion, we put the number of voters wrongly barred from voting at over 90,000, mostly Blacks and Hispanics, and by a wide majority, Democrats. That will take us to the Big Question: Was it deliberate, this purge so fortunate for the Republicans? Or just an honest clerical error? Go back to the case of Thomas Cooper, Criminal of the Future. I counted 325 of these time-traveling bandits on one of Harris's scrub lists. Clerical error? I dug back into the computers, the e-mail traffic in the Florida Department of Elections, part of the secretary of state's office. And sure enough, the office clerks were screaming: They'd found a boatload like Mr. Cooper on the purge list, convicted in the future, in the next century, in the next millennium. The jittery clerks wanted to
know what to do. I thought I knew the answer. As a product of
the Los Angeles school system, where I Pledged my Allegiance
to the Flag every morning, I assumed that if someone was wrongly
accused, the state would give them back their right to vote.
But the Republican operatives had a better idea. They told the
clerks to blank out the wacky conviction dates. That way, the
county elections supervisors, already wary of the list, would
be none the wiser. The You've seen barely a hair of any of this in the U.S. media. Why? How did 100,000 U.S. journalists sent to cover the election fail to get the vote theft story (and preferably before the election)? Part 2 tomorrow: 'Silence of
the Media Lambs' With hundreds of thousands of military personnel on the verge of combat, the administration wants to cut back on a 50-year-old program that helps schools near military bases. The federal impact aid program provides federal funds to school districts in this state and around the country so they can give children from military families a good education. But the administration has proposed a $125 million reduction to the program. The program would cease giving assistance to school districts for the students of military families who live off-base. Officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget argue that property taxes on their residences help the schools. That position neglects the larger reality that the bases themselves are exempt from property taxes that are paid by other big employers. Sales tax dollars also are lost to base facilities such as commissaries or exchanges. Since 1950, national policy-makers have understood the need to help school districts make up lost revenues. The proposal poses severe difficulties for many districts with large numbers of military dependents in school. The Central Kitsap School District would lose about $10 million from its $96 million annual budget. Oak Harbor, Clover Park, Bremerton and Lakewood would see lesser but significant cuts. In Oak Harbor, about 70 percent of base personnel are currently assigned overseas; cuts in their childrens' schools could certainly add to the stress already imposed on them and their families. The willingness to undercut military dependents' schools in the middle of the war on terrorism says just how strongly the president wants to make fundamental changes in domestic policies. Programs long supported by Republican and Democratic leaders face severe cutbacks or elimination in the president's proposed budget. The cuts blatantly contradict the kind of moderate rhetoric employed by the Bush campaign in 2000. In this case, the leader of a group of affected schools -- the National Association of Federally Impacted Schools -- says the Bush campaign actually expressed full support in 2000 for the aid program. The administration loves to propose innovative ideas for improving education. But when it undercuts longstanding programs, it is not delivering the financial support to back up those words. Military families'
support for good schools is well known. The administration should
be so sensible. Other than that, what
else could go wrong? I used to think President Bush was dumb. But I can’t think that any more. Any leader who manages to convince 70% of an electorate that he has the requisite judgment to launch a preemptive war on the basis of his peculiar two-year record as chief executive can’t be dumb. He could however be the most brilliant fool ever to occupy the Oval Office. Either that or Osama Bin Laden has managed to slip a potent soporific into the nation’s water supply. Senator Robert Byrd, in his courageous floor speech of Feb. 12th layed out the Bush administration’s record vividly. Byrd said, "In (a) scant two years, this Administration has squandered a projected surplus of some $5.6 trillion over the next decade and taken us to projected deficits as far as the eye can see...its domestic policy has put many of our states in dire financial condition, under-funding scores of essential programs for our people...it has fostered policies which have slowed economic growth...has ignored urgent matters such as the crisis in health care for our elderly...has been slow to provide adequate funding for homeland security...has been reluctant to better protect our long and porous borders." And, if that wasn’t enough to make the American people question their judgment in permitting this president to be the nation’s most powerful and belligerent sleepwalker, the senator from West Virginia goes on, "In foreign policy, this Administration has failed to find Osama bin Laden...has split traditional alliances, possibly crippling, for all time, International order-keeping entities like the United Nations and NATO...has called into question the traditional worldwide perception of the United States as well-intentioned, peacekeeper...has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labeling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence...of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come." I’ve never claimed to be a genius, but being a good citizen doesn’t require membership in Mensa. Conversely, there are a lot of smart people in the Bush Administration who, as my very plain-spoken father would have said, "...don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground." Being a good citizen requires, first, a most basic state: wakefulness. You can’t be a good citizen if you’re so hypnotized by fear (or righteousness) you allow yourself to be led into a kick-ass abyss. Columnist Nicholas Kristof stated recently that, "The big problem with liberals in international affairs is... they've been too idealistic." His point being that liberals, blinded by idealism, have pushed policies that have created as many problems as they’ve solved. Whether or not you agree with his assessment of outcomes, it’s not a stretch to accept his premise. There’s even an old aphorism for it. It’s called throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But it’s an approach not limited to liberals. Right now babies are being thrown out all over the place and bathwater’s flowing like the Big Muddy in bad year. As Kristof points out, "President Bush is also trying to be a foreign policy idealist — from the right — and is showing the same cavalier obtuseness to practical consequences." Here’s some Bush baby-with-bathwater
scenarios: 1. The president, outraged at the way the Chinese
government forces abortions on peasants, cuts off all $34 million
in U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund which
leads to program cancellations in Africa to train midwives, fight
AIDS and help pregnant women. 2. North Korea, Bush’s most
blatant, festering screw-up. Maybe for the noblest reasons, George
Dubya devised a pointedly religious epithet and lumped North
Korea into it. "Axis of evil" he intoned; which, as
Kristof observes, is the conservative version of the liberal
"Make love, not war" — and equally hollow. But why blame Powell? He and this nation (along the rest of the people of the world), are caught in an awful misguided inertia. We’ve been launched into a war to protect ourselves from war. Sound familiar? But as Jonathan Schell wrote in his piece The Case Against War, "In this imperative (of regime change) we’ve arrived at a new formula that has no precedent for dealing with weapons of mass destruction: nonproliferation by forced democratization. Schell cites Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard who says that a republic that turns into an empire risks "endangering its identity as a free people"--thus menacing democracy at home by trying to force it on others abroad. What’s wrong with an Imperial America? Well, as Schell points out, "The Bush Administration... has given little encouragement to the evangelists of armed democratization. Notoriously, it has kept silent regarding its plans for postwar Iraq and its neighbors. But if its actions in the "war on terror" are any guide, democracy will not be required of Washington's imperial dependencies." Nor, possibly, of the government of the United States of America itself. We should all understand at the
outset that we start down this road of naked imperialism at great
risk to our own freedoms and national character. Other than that,
what else could go wrong? |
|
All materials by Jim Culleny copyright 2003 ][ contact: info@noutopia.com