Vote fraud hasn't disappeared

Yes, I was wrong. Barack Obama was elected, and rather handily at that. And I'm happy for that, very pleased to have been wrong, very relieved that the neocons will be out of power come Jan. 20.

There was a considerable period of time during which I was one of the constant watchers who feared, at least a little, that the right wing extremists who have controlled the White House for so long might not vacate the premises regardless of the election outcome. Given the powerfully favorable reaction in this country and abroad to Obama's election, I doubt many still harbor that fear.

Even people who lean heavily to the right have expressed (assume temporary) support for the president-elect and happiness at what the election shows, or what they think it shows, about racial attitudes in the United States. They would not tolerate an illegal power grab, even one preceded by a false flag attack.

Just a couple of things:

First, those of us who predicted large-scale vote suppression efforts and fraud by the Republicans were not entirely wrong. The attempts were widespread, but considerably less successful than they were in 2000 and 2004 for several reasons.

One major reason was that the Republicans could not muster the big funding for such efforts that they received in the previous two presidential election years.

In the last couple of weeks before Nov. 4, I saw several reports about right wing billionaires cutting way back on their contributions to dirty tricks crews because of how hard they were hit by the economic collapse they helped to create. Greed and gut-level, immediate self interest outweighed their desire to keep Democrats out of power.

In fact, the emails now being sent by Republican Party organizations and fund raisers to their supporters are downright funny on the question of campaign money. They are filled with whines about how Republicans were outspent by Obama and other Democrats who somehow “unfairly” raised more money than they did.

The outraged wording of the messages strongly suggests that it is a Republican right to get and spend far more than their opponents. And the authors of the notes are angry -– deeply outraged, in fact -- that so many not-rich citizens kicked in enough to build bigger dollar totals for Obama and other Democrats than the rich folks provided John McCain and Republican congressional candidates.

(I got myself on some Republican email lists more than a year ago. It's been both revealing and entertaining.)

Another big reason the attempts to keep likely Democratic voters away from the polls were considerably less successful than some feared, and less successful than they might have been, was the simple stupidity of Republican planners and the somewhat unexpected firmness of numerous judges around the country. I'll spare the detail, but the fact is that attempts by Republicans to keep large blocs of people from voting were thrown out firmly and quickly by judges in several states.

Some of us had feared that the White House's campaign of loading the bench with right wingers had got far enough to permit even fairly weak vote-suppression efforts to fly, but that turned out not to be true. And in several instances, the cases brought by the Republicans were so feeble that even someone the likes of John Roberts or Samuel Alito would have been hard-pressed to come up with excuses to accept the arguments.

Also, and this was very important, extremely partisan and ethics-impaired state officials such as the Ohio secretary of state, have been replaced in several states since 2004.

Then there was the fact that, as reported by the New York Times and others, Democratic voters turned out in bigger numbers than in the past, while the turnout of Republican voters actually slipped by a bit more than 1 percent from 2004. Sarah Palin's presence on the Republican ticket may have inspired the right wing “base,” as the talking heads kept telling us, but apparently it didn't do much for saner middle class Republicans.

Now for the “buts:”

It is a very safe assumption that the actual vote for Obama, let alone the votes that would have been cast for him if some people had not been blocked from voting, was greater than the number reported. It is unrealistic to think that the illegal tricks used in 2000 and 2004 -– hiding of votes, hacking of voting machines to switch votes from Democrat to Republican candidates and such -– didn't take place this year.

There was far too much evidence such shenanigans going into the election. It's not an issue in the corporate news media because those tricks and vote suppression attempts were not enough keep Obama from winning. And Democrats are too happy to bother with sniffing out vote fraud.

That, while understandable, is a serious mistake.

It is so because there will be much closer elections in the future, as there have been in the past. If the Democrats don't make an effort beginning in January, when they will pretty much control U.S. government, to block future right wing vote suppression and vote fraud, it will cost them future elections, just as it cost them the presidency and probably a number of congressional seats in 2000 and 2004.

There are ways to set up voter registration requirements that will permanently shut down the worst of the vote suppression scams. The “Help America Vote” law, which was in fact designed to help trick out elections, can be revised so that it requires a paper trail on all votes and provides voters with a way of seeing that their votes are recorded properly. The law also can be rewritten to require machines that are not readily rigged for fraud, as are so many of the machines now in use.

Suppose Obama does what economist and New Yorks Times columnist Paul Krugman and a few others have recommended and comes out of the chute fighting. The hatred and opposition he'll get from the Wall Street crowd and the billionaires you never heard of will surpass anything we've seen since Franklin Roosevelt had the extreme right plotting an overthrow of our government.

In such a scenario, the Republicans won't have so much trouble raising the money to defeat him in 2012, and a fully-funded right wing, supported by an army of gun nuts, end-times evangelicals and other self-destructive haters could make re-election highly doubtful.

It wouldn't be good idea to leave the paths to vote suppression and fraud wide open.

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Sorry if this is a bit late in being posted. I wasn't avoiding admitting my error. Right after the election I took a break, went out of town to a conference on an area of interest that has nothing to do with electoral politics.

Republicans suppressing the vote

With just a few days to go to the 2008 election, it looks like Democrat Barack Obama will get more votes than will John McCain, the floundering, panic-stricken Republican candidate for president.

At least more Americans will try to vote for Obama than will vote for McCain.

The chances of Obama being sworn in as president of the United States may be substantially less than 50-50, however. The Obama vote will have to be overwhelming, a landslide -– no, a tidal wave -– to get the man into the Oval Office as anything but a visitor. If the polls are anywhere near right, that isn't going to happen.

Some congressional seats that would be won by Democrats in fair elections also probably will be taken by Republicans.

If you get your news primarily from corporate outlets, you may be unaware of, or at least know very little about, the second biggest under-reported story of this decade.

(Failure to report ahead of time on the inevitable collapse of the subprime mortgage pyramid probably ranks first.)

Corporate newspapers and broadcast outlets are largely ignoring a massive Republican campaign to suppress Democratic votes and to commit vote fraud on a grand scale -- bigger and considerably more widespread than the efforts of 2000, 2004 and 2006.

The corporate press is, in fact, helping the Republican cause beyond simply pretending that the party's suppression/fraud campaign doesn't exist. The ACORN flap was fake. That organization, engaged in registering mostly minority and low-income voters, flatly is not engaged in fraud. The publishers, editors and producers could not help but know that, since they know what really happened and even said so deep in some stories. But they played it big anyway.

That bit of slight of hand was created by the McCain campaign with the aid of various official and unofficial party organizations to cover the fact that the Republicans have a genuine and much bigger fraud campaign in place.

As I've said here several times over the past four or five years, if you want to know what the Republicans are doing on the dark side, look at what they claim their opponents are doing. It's a standard Rovian trick. Democratic “leaders” are blindsided every time, the corporate media always plays along.

The Democratic Party is, as usual, wandering around with its head......in the sand. The party “leaders” don't like real fights, and apparently won't take this one on.

For the past couple of months, I've been keeping clippings and printouts of news articles, editorials and op-ed essays detailing various pieces of the real vote suppression and fraud campaign. Stories on individual pieces of that campaign pop up here and there, but they almost never are picked up by corporate news agencies outside the immediately affected geographic area, and I don't know of any big news outlet that has put the pieces together to show its auditors or readers the whole picture.

CNN said last week it was going to try, but what it did was mostly just a rehash of the phony ACORN story.

My stack of paper on Republican vote suppression now is more than a foot deep. Might be two feet deep or more if I go through all of the pile next to my desk, but I've uncovered enough to make the point.

Here are some, only a sampling, of the components of what shapes up as a major Republican effort:

* Until mid-September, the Veterans Administration -– politicized like all other government departments under Bush/Cheney -– blocked efforts to register veterans in VA hospitals and residential facilities as voters. VA officials ignored demands from several congressmen that they allow registration efforts in those facilities. In September, Veterans for Common Sense won a lawsuit giving the veterans access to voter registration and to voting Nov. 4.

It is not known, however, whether election officials and non-partisan groups actually have been allowed into all of the VA facilities, or whether they've had to do their work this late in the game. (Information, Veterans for Common Sense and Associated Press.)

* In Wisconsin, the Republican attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen, filed suit in September seeking a court order to force the state's Government Accountability Board to cross-check voters who registered after Jan. 1, 2006, against Department of Transportation, criminal and death records. Completing such an examination before Nov. 4 is impossible and “will disenfranchise voters,” said Madison, Wis., City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl.

The suit covers only Dane County, an urban county with a high percentage of academics and students and other young people. It includes the main campus of the University of Wisconsin. The Government Accountability Board opposes the suit, saying the belated registration checks would uncover little or no fraud but would “cause unnecessary hardship and confusion at the polls.”

The board noted that discrepancies between various lists typically come because people often write their names differently on different forms -– using a middle initial on one, but not another, for example –- and do not involve fraud. (Information, the Capital Times, Madison, Wis.)

Almost identical suits have been filed by Republicans in several other urban areas around the country, mostly where the presidency and/or Senate seats are closely contested.

Several studies over several years have concluded that fraud in voting is extremely rare, by the way.

* Similarly, although some details differ, approximately 50,000 voters in Georgia have been “flagged” because computers determined, often inaccurately, that there are mismatches in their personal identification information in various files. About 4,500 of those, most of them native-born Americans, had their citizenship questioned. In many cases, notices carrying deadlines for clarifying the mismatches, proving citizenship and such were mailed too late for individuals to meet those deadlines. (Source, CNN.com, which reported on line that similar voter list purges are taking place across the country, and especially in swing states.)

* A number of reports indicate a high probability that the presidential election in Ohio will be stolen again.

One tactic, which would take a couple of pages to explain thoroughly, may disenfranchise up to 600,000 Ohio voters, mostly in areas which have high percentages of minority and low-income citizens, according to groups such as Advancement Project and Project Vote that advocate for the poor or seek to increase voter registration.

This tactic comes directly from the Republican Party and was passed by the Republican-dominated State Legislature in 2005. (Oddly, it sunsets – ceases to exist – on Jan. 1 of next year.) It requires county boards to send non-forwardable notices to voters 60 days before an election, and effectively disenfranchises anyone whose notice is returned.

People do not have to be notified that their voter registrations are in question. A board can overturn the disenfranchisement, but not until after the election, of course, since people won't know they've been cut from the rolls until they try to vote.

An Advancement Project spokeswoman pointed out that a single piece of mail may be returned for many reasons, including errors in the data base from which it is sent, mailing label misprints, failure to include an apartment number and a host of other errors on the mailing end.

Several other people have noted that members of the military called to active duty often are among those who lose their vote under the system.

This suppression technique, called “caging” is being used this year by Republicans in several swing states. (Information, Advancement Project, Project Vote, TruthOut.)

Also note that, in defiance of a court order, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties destroyed election materials from the 2004 election that would have shown what happened (how the election was stolen) that year.

One thing that is known is that more than 300,000 registered voters in Ohio, all but a tiny handful in heavily Democratic districts, were purged from the rolls in 2004 by Republican-controlled election boards. After the 2004 election, another 170,000 voters were purged in another county that recently had tipped toward Democrats. (Bush “won” the 2004 election in Ohio by 119,000 votes.)

There also were at least partially successful attempts to prevent absentee balloting by residents of heavily Democratic areas, other attempts to cancel voter registrations, big questions about use of electronic voting machines and numerous incidents of potential voters being given false information and falsely threatened with legal action if they voted. (Several sources, including, notably, The Smirking Chimp Web site,)

* In Michigan, where the Republicans are using several tactics to block votes by Democrats, a favorite method is to use a list of home foreclosures in predominately black neighborhoods to challenge voters at the polls.

A foreclosure notice does not mean that someone has moved as yet. But the voters will be challenged, and some will be chased off; others will be unable or afraid to fight the challengers through official means to regain their vote. (Sources, Marketwatch.com and Michigan Messenger.)

Intimidation is, in fact, a major reason such tactics work.

* In Mississippi, which has a hotly contested Senate race going, Gov. Haley Barbour, with the help of the state's secretary of state, put the senate race at the very bottom of the ballot, although state election law requires that federal elections must be at the top of the ballot. Under that law, Senate candidates should be right below the candidates for president.

The two state officials claimed they could put the Senate contest at the bottom, where they hope it will be overlooked by some voters, because it is a special election. The seat was vacated by Trent Lott (you remember that sweetheart) and the man who is now the Republican candidate was appointed to fill it temporarily by Gov. Barbour. (Sources, Clarion Ledger, New York Times)

* On Air America Radio, and in much more detail in Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio reported that Republicans are using 30 (yes 30) distinct scams around the country, particularly in swing states, to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

A favorite involves those name-match techniques. If you signed your voter registration card as P.K. Whoknows, but signed your drivers license application Pepe K. Whoknows, Republican poll watchers, who have the lists, will challenge your right to vote, and in some places will be able to have you removed from voting rolls. Think of all of the various official documents you've signed; it's a very good bet they don't all match.

Such techniques, again, are being applied almost exclusively to districts with high percentages of likely Democratic voters. They're being used in New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, Colorado, Montana and several other states, notably newly competitive states in the South. (Sources, Air America, Rolling Stone, TruthOut.)

* In Florida, a wide variety of reports show, every possible vote suppression technique seems to be in play again. And, though I haven't seen anything specific on this, the use of cops to chase potential black and low-income Hispanic voters from the polls seems as likely now as it did in 2000, when there were many reliable reports of such activity, including several by major corporate news organizations.

Florida's Republican-controlled legislature deliberately limited the early-voting hours to just a few within the working day, weekdays. The law also severely limited the number of early-voting sites. The obvious goal, according to Floridians, was to inhibit voting by elderly residents, the disabled and working poor who dare not stay away from their jobs to vote and who are likely to vote Democratic.

This week, after the tactic received coverage on television and in some newspapers outside of Florida, the state's governor issued an executive order expanding the early voting hours. There's no way to know how many voters were discouraged by their first attempts and learn of the new hours, or won't trust that they can vote, however.

The ballot in Florida's Palm Beach County has such a peculiar layout that many voters in past elections have complained of mistakenly voting for the wrong candidates. There is a similar problem in North Carolina. (Source, New York Times.)

* In North Carolina, black citizens at an early voting site were loudly heckled by a group of McCain supporters. (Source, Democracy Now.)

* In some venues, voting officials have deliberately given college students false information, leading them to believe they are not eligible to vote. (TruthOut.)

* In Montana, 6,000 voters were purged from the voting rolls in Democrat-leaning counties on the grounds that their mailing addresses had changed. Turns out a significant number of those purged are military personnel on active duty -– quite a few serving in Iraq -– and another substantial number are students seeking to vote in their home districts. There also were a number of elderly folks who had moved from their homes to senior housing and hadn't yet changed their registration addresses. (Source, an irate essay by John Bohlinger, Republican lieutenant governor of Montana. )

* In several states, voting machines have switched Democratic votes to Republican candidates in early elections. There are many problems, yet, with such machines, particularly in swing states.

There are so many similar stories I could double the length of this piece and still not come close to using all of those I have in hand. There's the story of hundreds of absentee ballots being sent out with the name “Barack Osama” instead of Barack Obama. And there's the story of an email sent by the Pennsylvania Republican Party's “Victory 2008” committee to Jews throughout the state, falsely alleging that Obama “taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud” and hinting that Obama has the same goals for Jews as Hitler did in the 1930s. And many more.

So just one final note:

Reporter Alexander Bolton wrote an article I found on thehill.com on Oct. 21 about the efforts of police departments in major cities across the country to “beef up their ranks” and otherwise prepare for “possible civil unrest and riots” once the Nov. 4 election returns are known.

The facts of his story were confirmed by Catherine Elsworth, Los Angeles-based reporter for the British paper, The Telegraph.

“Some worry that if Barack Obama loses and there is suspicion of foul play in the election, violence could ensue in cities with black populations,” Bolton wrote.

Among the many scary facts in the story: In Oakland, cops plan to deploy extra units in riot gear, as well as extra traffic cops, and will have SWAT teams on standby. (Do you suppose those cops might intimidate would-be voters? Having seen the ninja turtles in their black armor during the Republican National Convention, I tell you flatly that they will.)

Similar preparations have been made in Chicago, Philadelphia and other large cities with substantial black populations, Bolton said.

He and Elsworth said cops are worried that angry mobs could be set off not by an Obama loss, as such, but by perception of another stolen election. One possible trigger, they said, is a repeat of the deliberate tactic, widely used in 2000 and 2004, of keeping black citizens from voting by providing too few voting machines and polling places in their neighborhoods, thus requiring standing in lines for many hours to vote, and having the polls close before you can vote, or perhaps by jiggering of voting machines, or discovery of other tricks.

One can't but ask: Do the cops know something we don't?

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Isn't it ironic? Republicans claim to want to export “democracy” to other countries, but try very hard to keep it from functioning in America. Of course, what they mean by “democracy” when talking of other countries is corporate rule.

See you in the camps.

Gas price electioneering

Excited about the big drop in gasoline prices?

Don't get too wound up.

At the beginning of the July 4 holiday period in 2006, the average price of gasoline in the United States was $2.873. By the middle of October, as the mid-term elections neared, the national average price of gasoline was $2.219, and prices hit a low of $2.02 in states such as Missouri, that, coincidentally, were states the Republican Party felt it needed to win.

By early December of 2006, a time when gasoline prices historically drop, the national average price of a gallon of gasoline had bounced back to $2.297. The elections were over. The price of gasoline jumped around quite a bit over the next few months, with several reasons cited for the volatility, but we know the trend was up, up, up.

Oil company execs know who provides the special tax breaks at times when they're already pulling in profits at unprecedented levels.

But of course it's all coincidental.

The truth: We are two Americas

Over all, the United States of America has the government it deserves.

Millions of us, and the rest of the world, deserve better, but there doesn't seem to be much of significance we can do about that at the moment. The ignorant rule. Or, rather, the plutocrats rule to their own benefit, and the deluded mob supports them.

A change of presidents, if it comes, will not change that significantly.

Think about the fact that Sarah Palin, a babbling fool who isn't even qualified for her first political job as mayor of a very small town, is the Republican Party's vice presidential candidate and that she is adored by a significant portion of the population.

Think about Sen. Ted Stevens, the Republican senator from Palin's home state of Alaska, who is a grasping, self-serving, power-loving plutocrat, on trial for corruption but still apt to be re-elected.

Think about the fact that Michele Bachmann, at least equal to Palin in ignorance and lack of intellectual capacity, represents Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District, and probably will be reelected in November.

Think about all of the other venal fools and obvious crooks who hold high office in this country. Think about the lumpish egomaniac who lost two elections but still sits in the White House and is called president.

It is difficult to explain to someone from another country –- it is difficult for many of us to understand –- but obviously it is true that millions of Americans really do want their country run by people who are as undereducated and as lacking in curiosity and ability to understand complex questions as they are themselves. Corrupt crooks? No problem; elect them anyway if they share your view of gays or immigrants.

“My opinion is as good as anyone else's” is a sentence I've heard many times from people who have no understanding at all of economics, history, science or philosophy –- in fact, no comprehension of a world beyond their limited circles, no clue as to the way government works and no sense of morality beyond what the preachers tell them on Sunday mornings.

As the crowds at Palin's rallies demonstrate, millions of Americans believe that “being a mom” is all the experience one needs to be vice president, and therefore president, of the United States.

Juggling play dates and getting kids to hockey practice on time is regarded as sufficient to teach one how to deal with multiple wars and evaluate possible solutions to global warming –- unless one rejects the concept because it doesn't fit with what you believe about “end days,” of course.

So, no, their opinions aren't as good as anyone else's. But they never will recognize that.

Get out there and listen to those people, the American electorate. You'll find they believe that “all men are equal,” and don't grasp the fact that the equality the founders of this country aimed for was equality of opportunity. If you're a dummy, you are NOT equal to a knowledgeable, intellectually active person when it comes to discerning how best to govern this over-sized country.

It was not the illiterate stable hands nor even the barkeeps, good men though they may have been, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and led the Revolution against England.

That is an admission none of us are supposed to make, lest we be struck down as “elitists.” Strive to elect politicians who are smarter than the average loaf of bread and know more than the average 12-year-old and we become “Eastern elitists,” which is something as repulsive as dog droppings on the soles of one's shoes.

The mob despises “elites,” which is to say intelligent, educated people with some understanding of the world beyond the circumscribed lives of middle class suburbanites.

Palin's “real America,” is semi-literate, despises knowledge, deeply mistrusts anyone who isn't exactly like themselves and, in fact, wants to banish all who are different -- particularly darker skinned people and those who come from different cultures.

If you doubt that, you haven't been out and about much outside your own liberal circles. Twice in the past week I've heard Republican voters -– the very people who are being hurt the most by the economy created by the political right -– railing about blacks and Hispanics and Asians and blaming them for everything from the downward slide of our cities to the great economic crash of 2008.

In fact, Bachmann said a few days ago that the meltdown of financial institutions is the fault of non-whites and the white folks who coddle them.

The “real Americans” wouldn't put someone as ignorant as themselves in charge of the corporations in which they make their livings, but they have no qualms about putting such a person in the White House or Congress.

Because the people who play to them and simultaneously abuse them –- the corporate right wingers –- tell them so, they believe that government is simple. Listen to the conversations around you when you're outside your own circle of safety. See how often you here someone say about some complex problem , “All you have to do is....” or “We just have to....”

Usually, we “just have to cut taxes” and/or “cut the fat out of government” because that's what the corporate executives and the politicians they own tell us.

Want to have some fun? Ask one of those lunch room experts to be specific about how another tax cut for the rich will benefit all of America or, even better, to get specific about that “fat” in government.

Where, very precisely, is all that fat that will save us billions of dollars? Demand facts, not right-wing generalizations, but be prepared to duck. They tend to get angry when caught with their ignorance on display.

To some unknown degree, a majority of the American public walks blindly through life because we no longer have a functioning mass news system. We have a mass propaganda system, easily manipulated by the political right and inclined anyway to believe whatever the power elite tells them.

Need an example?

People who regularly read good Internet news sources such as TruthOut, know that the Republicans already have in place a massive system of vote suppression and election fraud which will function powerfully on Nov. 4. But ask your neighbors what they know of that.

You'll find that most of them “know” ACORN is a corrupt organization that has been busy registering fraudulent voters. They don't know that's been disproven time after time. They know nothing of the huge Republican vote suppression efforts in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado and other states, and they certainly don't know about the blatant fixing of voting machines to produce Republican election victories in some of those states.

Few of the “mainstream” media have mentioned those facts. The New York Times and McClatchy newspapers do some good reporting, but they're inconsistent, and most dailies and almost all of television are useless for getting a handle on what's really going on in this crumbling country.

CNN tried Thursday, Oct. 23, to report on vote suppression, but it so carefully, and falsely, “balanced” the reports that they gave the impression that the suppression techniques were necessary to stem massive voter fraud – which, in fact, is nonexistant except in swing states where the Republican Party has set up its scams.

We'd have better major news sources if the American public demanded them, but often –- you've heard it many times from co-workers and neighbors -– Americans don't want to know about all the unpleasantness. They're happier with a “news” media that ignores the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the astonishing evils perpetrated in Africa by people who buy American arms.

News like that can spoil one's dinner and take the fun out of watching “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”

I have no polls on this in hand, but I'd be willing to bet that a majority of Americans figure the huge bailout of banks and brokerages is necessary to save our economy because the bigshots say so.

I'll give very big odds that only a small minority is aware of the fact that about $25 billion of $125 billion of our tax dollars just turned over to nine big American banks will be used to pay dividends to stockholders of those banks, and that $250 million of that amount will go directly into the pockets of the banks' executives and directors. (Figures from an op-ed piece by David S. Scharfstein and Jeremy C. Stein in the New York Times of Oct. 21.)

This is a fact: We are two countries within a single set of borders and coastlines. The bigger of the two countries is insular, anti-intellectual, uninterested in knowing truths that don't fit its preferred view of the world. Its denizens believe the corporate elite on all major points, even as that elite takes more and more of the wealth and power to itself and systematically disenfranchises most citizens and undermines their futures and the futures of their children.

The wealthiest five percent of the population exports the country's jobs, effectively cuts the pay of workers while expanding their work loads, pays their politicians to see to it that the country's educational system deteriorates. That small group of plutocrats keeps health care beyond the reach of an ever larger portion of the population in order to avoid paying taxes for a real care system. They let the country's infrastructure deteriorate for the same reason, and refuse to do anything about climate change or environmental degradation or oil dependency because there is big money to be made from preserving the status quo.

Meanwhile, the victims who have joined Palin's “real America” are focused on deliberately goosed up issues such as abortion and -– horrors! -- the possibility that gay Americans might be treated simply as citizens. The “real Americans” can grasp such issues, or think they can, without having to think about them. They also have swallowed whole the money elite's constantly touted idea that all taxes are bad.

The smaller country, the educated, the people who seek to understand how things work here and abroad and hope to maintain a semblance of democracy and equality of opportunity...that country is in very deep trouble and may be driven into hiding before long. It is not gladly tolerated by the richest five percent who increasingly own everything worth having within the borders and coastlines of what is called (now ironically) the United States of America.

Don't bite on the blather about “reaching across the aisle,” no matter who's doing the blathering.

The two Americas cannot cooperate in any meaningful way. The far right does not compromise, and it has filled its army of the ignorant with hate; it is like a horde of Genghis Khan's Mongols, intent on destroying all who impede conquest.

Conservatives and progressives, old-style Republicans and Democrats, could compromise. But the decent human beings who once made up the Republican Party are irrelevant now; they exist in an ether, without power or influence.

One side will win, the other will lose and be left as ineffective as today's old Eisenhower Republicans. If the right wins, their opposition may face much, much worse than loss of influence.
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A couple of relevant facts:

On Oct. 22, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, supported by 30 countries around the world, released the results of a 20-year study. It found that economic inequality had increased in 27 of the 30 countries over that period. The highest levels of inequality –- more wealth accruing to the already wealthy while poverty increased among the general population -– were in Mexico, Turkey and the United States. The gaps between rich and poor have increased substantially since 2000, the report said. France, which America's right wing politicians love to berate and mock, was one of three countries that showed progress toward greater equality.

Wordsmart, a company that sells vocabulary-improvement home courses, says that from 1950 to the present, the useful vocabulary of the average American teenager dropped from 25,000 to 10,000 words. That's roughly a 60 percent decrease in the number words kids readily recognize and can use. It seems obvious: If you lack the words to describe, analyze, think with, you can't think critically to any real depth. At this rate, Americans will be reduced to “Me Tarzan, you Jane” by 2050.

Observations on a small, conservative city

It's beginning to seem that America's right wing nuts hate themselves almost as much as they despise everybody who isn't them –- which is to say white, dogmatically religious, and proudly ignorant of other places, other cultures and other points of view.

How else explain the fact that supporters of the extreme political right continually, actively, even vehemently fight against their own interests? How explain that they apparently adore politicians and the tiny minority of fabulously wealthy people who, with the help of right-wing politicians, take and keep everything they can from the rest of us?

Such thoughts were inspired by a long drive around St. Cloud, Minnesota, and its little metropolitan area on Monday, Oct. 13. There's no science to this, only observation:

St. Cloud is the core city of central Minnesota, a town of roughly 67,000 at the center of a little metropolitan area that has a population of about 185,000. About 40 percent of its residents have some German ancestry, according to the most recent census figures, and a very large chunk of the population –- 66,000-plus out of a membership for all churches of a bit more than 105,000 -– are Roman Catholic.

It also has a long history of racist and antisemitic incidents, mostly centering on St. Cloud State University. And it is a center of antiabortion activity.

It was one of the few areas in Minnesota that gave a solid majority of its votes to George W. Bush in 2004, although John Kerry topped Bush statewide.

Near the golf club, most of the McMansions display McCain lawn signs, of course. They're the homes of the early middle aged, sort-of rich second-level corporate executives and lawyers who, at least until a few weeks ago, erroneously fancied themselves as on their way to joining the rolls of the masters of the universe.

Oddly, I spotted only a couple of lawn signs for Michele Bachmann in the neighborhood. She's the outrageously silly, far-right Sixth District first-term congresswoman who is best known for embracing George W. Bush at a public event and not letting go. Don't know what to make of that lack of visible support among the people who are to large degree responsible for disgracing my state with her presence in Congress.

In St. Cloud's solidly middle class neighborhoods, lawn signs for the presidential candidates are unusually sparse. By my observation, Obama signs outnumbered McCain signs by a clear but not overwhelming number.

I'd love to know what that combination means –- relatively few signs, but a majority for the Democrat –- but I doubt that a poll would tell us. It's one of those situations that invites lies to pollsters: Folks in a heavily Catholic, historically very conservative town who are leaning toward a pro-choice, black Democrat may not want their neighbors to know where they stand. Other residents may not want to admit to all and sundry that they won't vote for a black man under any circumstances. Like that.

I saw very few signs in support of Norm Coleman, the Bush-backing senator who is desperately trying now to pretend he's an “independent thinker,” and none for his Democratic opponent, comedian Al Franken, who is greatly despised by country folks for his irreverent and sometimes foul-mouthed humor, as inaccurately presented to them by the Republican party.

The “What are these people thinking?” moments of my drive came in the hardscrabble neighborhoods, and there are a lot of those in central Minnesota and north.

They are places where little, old frame houses, quite a few in poor repair, sit next to warehouses and light industrial buildings, and places where a neighborhood six or seven blocks long and four or five blocks deep is completely surrounded by more warehouses, cheap retail outlets and heavily-used roads.

There are more political signs in those neighborhoods than in the vicinity of the country club, and they are overwhelmingly McCain/Palin signs. In fact, I don't recall seeing a single Obama sign in the several low-income neighborhoods I drove through.

It is not logical, but I've seen the same thing in poorer, mostly-white neighborhoods in Minneapolis. The people whose jobs are most at risk, who have the hardest time getting reliable health care, whose pay has been stagnant for years as prices rise and the rich get enormously richer, whose schools have become run down and overcrowded -– those people are passionately for the politicians who are deliberately tearing down their lives and blocking any chances they or their children had for economic improvement.

I think it is to some degree a testament to how successful the right has been in dumbing down our educational system and creating a class of low-level workers too ignorant to recognize that they are being exploited. They're angry and they hate, but the negative emotions are turned 180 degrees from those who are the source of their problems.

In the case of St. Cloud, the support among the relatively poor for those who will do them the most harm almost certainly also has a strong religious element. St. Cloud, in my experience and observation, still fosters the kind of Catholicism that says the priests and bishops are the undeniable holders of moral truth, and the priests and bishops are immovably against birth control and stem cell research and freedom for gays, and they have made abortion virtually the only issue that matters in the eyes of many of their faithful.

Ergo: One cannot vote for a Democrat without real risk of being condemned to Hell.

It's not only the Catholics who cling to such views, of course. Many of the more rabid evangelicals hold to the same beliefs, and there are lots of small true-believer churches around St. Cloud.

But what's more puzzling is that the same pro-right views seem to be at the very core of what even the non-religious hold dear in places like St. Cloud and some of the poorer blue-collar neighborhoods of cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul and, no doubt almost everywhere across the country.

There are only two things I can come to in explanation.

One is the success of the far right in preaching simple-minded, pro-war “my country right or wrong” jingoism, with powerful undertones of racism, religious bigotry and fear of all things “foreign.” The right has been pushing those views for decades, and the left hasn't even tried to make a counter effort. The Democratic Party, the organization, is stuck in the 1940s, assuming despite massive evidence to the contrary that its positions are so obviously correct that it doesn't have to sell them.

Hell, much of the time it doesn't even fight for equal time, or stand up to the election fraud that the Republican Party has made a routine part of its campaigns.

The other thing, and I admit I'm on very shaky ground here, is drawn from many conversations over the past few years with people in places like St. Cloud and Alexandria (another, smaller city northwest of St. Cloud, with a more rural outlook). And that is that a lot of people seem to dislike themselves for not being richer and smarter. Especially richer. Yet they also and more openly despise most people who are different from themselves, especially those who are highly educated –- the much hated “intellectual elite.”

Maybe they draw some comfort by associating themselves with the views of the corporate big shots and mock-populist pols such as George Bush, Newt Gingrich, et al.

I'd like to have a roomful of shrinks chew that over for a bit.

If Barack Obama does become president –- still doubtful, I think, given the likelihood of massive electoral fraud by the Republicans, not ACORN -- and even if the economic meltdown brings the Democrats substantial majorities in both houses of Congress, we probably will see more of what we've had over recent years. The political right, though a minority, will choose the topics, pick the battles, get the headlines, shape what the country believes and continue to spread their power over a growing army of the ignorant. The odds are that a Democratic government, if it comes, will be short-lived.

And we will continue on our road to becoming a backward, third world mess of a country fighting a cultural civil war rather than working toward a common good.

How desperately we need a progressive political party, and how unlikely it is that we will get one.

Fraud on a grand scale

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” -- Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator, 1922-43, creator of modern fascism.


To be fair, it should be noted that Mussolini was talking about something more than business corporations when he spoke about the merger of corporate and government power. “Corporation” in his lexicon included other centers of power, such as industry organizations, the church, all sorts of powerful, right-leaning organizations. Italian business leaders loved it anyway, since they also controlled those other organizations.

Anyway, welcome to end times – the end of American democracy, that is. Welcome, too, to American corporatism.

What we soon will have is Mussolini's dream, a dictatorship of the very few, the very rich, coordinated by a little gang of political managers who are eager to rule an empire on behalf of that tiny economic elite. Never mind that the empire is imploding; there's still plenty of money and power to be had.

Here are some observations suggesting that our democracy is, indeed, on its last legs and that it's time to start talking about how to live, or survive, under circumstances that are terribly different from what we have known all of our lives:

* The corporate media all but ignored the fact that the White House threatened martial law if Congress did not pass its bailout bill. That bill, now law, saves some of the country's richest and most powerful aristocrats from financial losses but does nothing, from the viewpoint of the vast majority of citizens, to heal the economy. Less than nothing, in fact. It will drain our purses even further, transfer much of what we have left to the super-rich.

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., stood up in the House before the second vote on the bailout bill and listed the threats made by the White House, through Treasury officials, about what would happen if the House again rejected the bill. It was fear-mongering on a scale that overshadowed even the lying threats used to get us into Iraq. A select few members of Congress, Sherman among them, were told that if the bill didn't pass, martial law might be declared. Others were merely threatened with investment market collapse (on a scale we are on the way to achieving anyway).

The rightist propaganda machines that pass for news operations declined to tell the public about the threat to stage a coup.

America no longer has a mass media dedicated to keeping it informed. It does have an executive branch that threatens, and may be ready, to throw out our form of government, to simply take over, unless all of its demands are met by our increasingly powerless Congress.

* It seems clearer with each day that we know considerably less than we may have thought we knew about the worldwide economic meltdown. We have been told that the financial collapse, the drying up of credit, the dive of the stock markets are rooted in the discovery that the value of mortgages behind a bunch of securities is considerably less than it was supposed to be.

But wait a minute.

The worst estimates predict foreclosure on about two million mortgages in the United States, and many of those, probably a majority, wouldn't be going into the tank had not the credit market dried up. And that supposedly dried up because many mortgage-backed securities were bad. It's a circular argument.

Many of the home buyers could have been rescued simply by renegotiating to more reasonable interest rates from their lenders. Of course, that assumes the lenders are/were run by intelligent, responsible human beings, an assumption we now know beyond doubt is not true.

So how did this American dive turn so quickly into a crisis involving the biggest banks around the world? France, Germany, all of Europe, in fact, have had to bail out some of their biggest banks over the past couple of weeks, apparently because all of them owned some of those mostly worthless mortgage-backed securities and/or depended on big American banks for loans. Now its spreading into Asia.

Huh?

It doesn't track, unless, for example, there is some sort of gigantic Ponzi scheme underlying the crisis. Did some of the undeniably crooked subprime mortgage lenders sell the same bundles of mortgages, the same securities, to more than one buyer? Are the perpetrators more criminal and are the banks even more careless and more stupid than we think?

(Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant, promised a 50 percent short-term return on investments he sold. He kept the thing going for quite a long time, taking out enough money to live a lavish life, but selling more and more of the “investments” and paying off earlier investors with the proceeds from more recent sales. There were no actual investments.)

That may be wildly off-target, yet the size of the mortgage default pool doesn't seem to fit the size of the bank and investment firm collapse.

Perhaps it's more simple: The banks extended far too much credit in all directions, including to us through our credit cards, and the failure of just one base card in the house of cards was enough to bring it all down.

At any rate, I want a real explanation, plus some real answers about what can be done. Picking my pocket to keep some masters of the universe in mansions, yachts and private jets is not the right answer. Of that I am certain.

* To repeat -– and this has to be hammered at until everyone understands:

The bailout plan that was pushed through our Congress of cowards, has no purpose other than to save some very rich people some big money. See what Dennis Kucinich has to say on that score. (One report, by Chris Hedges, can be found at http://www.truthdig.com. Or simply Google “Kucinich, bailout.” In a reasonable world, Kucinich would be the Democratic nominee for president.

For thoughts on what really is needed to begin recovery, see Bob Herbert's op-ed column in the Oct. 7, 2008, New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com).

* A new plan, announced Monday (Oct. 6) will have the Federal Reserve System buy enormous amounts of unsecured short term debt, called commercial paper, that corporations use to finance their day-to-day operations. The Fed will do it because banks won't lend to those corporations any more. Never before has the Fed been involved in anything like such involvement with corporations.

That means, folks, that the Fed, which exists on our money, will loan directly to big corporations, getting unsecured -- and, in some cases, undoubtedly worthless -- notes in exchange. There is no guarantee that the Fed (we) will be paid.

Other countries, notably Sweden in recent years, have taken temporary ownership of banks and/or other corporations that had to be bailed out. The governments were then able to run the businesses efficiently, get rid of failed but hugely over-paid executives, and sell the corporations or their assets once they had returned to stability.

But the masters of the universe who own American politicians and corporations won't have that. That would be (Horrors!!!!) socialism. So government must hand the supremely rich corporate owners and executives billions of dollars of our money and hope that those dummies, who destroyed the businesses, will fix them with at least some of those dollars, not stuffing too much into their own pockets.

We cannot have a government-funded program to restore our crumbling infrastructure. We cannot treat mortgage debt as we do other debt, so that courts can restructure the terms of loans. We cannot control executive pay -- and, despite what you've been told, the bailout law doesn't limit such pay in most cases. We can't put more public money into saving our crumbling educational system. And most especially we cannot have universal health care in this country. (Just ask John McCain; he is adamantly, one might say wildly, against it. In fact, he wants to do away with Medicare.)

All of those things would be socialism, not to mention expensive.

But our government can take billions of our dollars –- we're rapidly headed toward trillions –- and put them at tremendous risk in a very dicey attempt to bail out corporations run to ruin by fantastically greedy owners and executives who will remain in power.

And let us remember that we continue to spend billions on a useless and powerfully destructive war, a fact that deeply undercut our economy long before mortgage-backed securities fell into a pit.

We are told over and over that we “must save Wall Street to save Main Street.”

It is a lie equal to “We have proof that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.” We're not saving Wall Street, just a few of its richest denizens, and we're certainly not doing anything to save Main Street.

But taking from the millions to protect the wealth of the richest 1 percent of us -- that, apparently is not socialism.

Well, perhaps it isn't exactly socialism, since the vast majority of us pay but stand no chance of getting anything back for our contributions. So perhaps we need a different label for what's going on, something similar, but with a different meaning.

How about National Socialism? Does that work, do you think?



Coming:

* We can expect major efforts at vote fraud on behalf of John McCain and other Republican candidates. The evidence that everything is in place for that effort removes any question of whether it will happen.

* One of the major forces behind the dismantling of the U.S. Constitution is, of course, big business, but smaller businesses have become active participants in the destruction of our democracy over the past two decades. The business of American business is fraud, and to get away with it, the masters of universe needed their politicians to get rid of the rule of law and to put government of, by and for the people out of the way.

Unintended lessons of the bailout

That the American people are going to be swindled again, or further swindled, to bail out the untouchable, unreachable rich seems inevitable.

The volume of commentary on the banker bailout is huge, and most of it should go directly to the “junk” folder or a recycling plant. I'm not going to add to the pile. Instead, at the bottom of this, I'll include links to some informed and truly perceptive analyses that you almost certainly won't find in the corporate media. It will suffice for now to say that the best and most knowledgeable observers agree that the plan will indeed aid the big-buck bankers while doing little for the rest of us.

We need to talk, however. There are some related issues that aren't being discussed at all, so far as I can find. This is a good time to think about who's doing this to us, and how and why.

Know thine enemy. And thine jackass.

As I write this, the U.S. Senate has just approved the lightly altered bailout plan (Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008). The House is expected to vote Thursday (Oct. 2), and like most people I know, I'm betting it also will approve the scheme, though more narrowly.

Leaders of both parties have had sufficient time to bring serious pressure to bear on those who voted no the first time around, and all sorts of games, from nasty to petty, are being played to line up the yes votes.

A couple of reports today say Congressional leaders have blocked constituent emails to members of Congress on the phony grounds that they fear their server will crash. Constituent contacts have been overwhelmingly against the bailout, members of Congress admit. But an employee of my Congressman, Keith Ellison, said the blockage is not deliberate. He said the servers simply can't handle the volume of emails being sent prior to the vote. I tried a couple of times to email Ellison and couldn't get far enough to enter text, let alone hit the send key.

His Minnesota office is answering telephone calls. That's good enough.

One thing that the public really must notice, or be led to notice, is that the corporate media are once again acting as touts for the powerful politicians who are most involved in screwing us over. Like the public, they're pretty much ignoring the lame George W. Bush. No one, possibly including even his wife and daughters, any longer believes that what he has to say about anything matters to anyone.

The media are jumping through hoops for the Congressional leadership of the Corporate Party, however. That is, for the top dogs of both Republican and Democratic wings of the party, who are united on the bailout to a degree not seen since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Listen to the language the next time you turn on CNN or CNBC. (Fox Propaganda? We know what they'll say about anything before Bill O'Reilly warms up his tonsils.)

The people of the perfect teeth are working hard to assure us that the bailout is necessary “not for Wall Street, but for Main Street,” as the corporate elite's political water carriers have so nicely phrased it. Opponents of the scheme are made, with smirks and well-placed little head shakes, to seem misguided. Proponents are presented as sages, doing their best to rescue a public that “doesn't understand” the plan.

Note that in print, even more than on television or radio thus far, the Washington scheme is increasingly referred to as “the rescue plan,” rather than the bailout. That was prescribed by party and congressional leadership, and a bunch of the newspapers and the Associated Press –- once the most neutral of all news services-– jumped on it immediately. A couple of longer neutral terms are used by some reporters who couldn't quite swallow “rescue” in one bite.

The party hotshots are “rebranding” the bailout. It's still the same pile of horse dung in the middle of a muddy street, but from now on we're going to call it something like “Frederick's Fine Fertilizer” and the press will work to make you believe your nose is wrong and that it really smells sweet. And that probably will work in the long run.

If you listen carefully to the language of the television spinners, read carefully, and watch the well-rehearsed “spontaneous” facial expressions and body language, you'll see the salesmanship at work.

What it tells you is important, and though we all know it, we tend to forget: Broadcast “news” generally isn't reporting these days so much as it is flackery, and the loudmouth salesmen and the plethora of babes who've replaced real reporters on most television systems are there to sell their masters' points of view. The situation isn't much better on most newspapers.

(Revealing sidelight: In newspapers, both reporters and writers of letters to the editor frequently refer to “extreme leftists” and the “extreme left of the Democratic Party.” No news story ever refers to a Republican as a right winger or extremist, and as frequent letter writers of liberal persuasion can attest,
no letter using such a phrase will be printed. Right wingers are merely “conservatives.”)

The other important side story of our miserable economic situation is how much it reveals about our politicians and the people who own them.

Ye, gods: John McCain and Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Putnam lined up shoulder to shoulder to march over us. (Putnam is the redheaded right wing nutter from Florida's 12th Congressional District who has been on television a lot the past week, expounding on the need for the bank bailout.)

It's enough to make the heart of a $30-million-a-year bank executive go pittypat.

There has been some media talk, though much too little, about the 180-degree difference of opinion between the Democrats who voted against the bailout the first time around and the Republicans who did the same. The difference matters. It, coupled with the fact that a big bloc of Democrats voted for the bill, demonstrates better than any nose count on any other issue why a victory of Obama over McCain won't be anything like enough to bring desperately needed “change” to our government.

The Democrats who voted against the bill Sunday did so mostly for the right reasons, according to various reports, including those from news outfits that disapprove. Very pointed nudges from hundreds and even thousands of constituents helped, of course. The stated reasons were that the Treasury plan was too much a handout to the bankers and others who created the economic spinout in the first place, and provided too little help to the victims of their fraud and avarice and to the vast majority of taxpayers.

Many of the right-wing Republicans who rejected the pro-bailout arguments of their leaders and the White House did so because, they said, it was a “big step toward socialism.”

No, they weren't kidding.

Dozens of “free-market” Republican zealots have found a home in Congress since Ronald Reagan arrived, dragging Phil Gramm, Newt Gingrich and other extremists behind him. They get a lot of help from the Blue (Dirty) Dog Democrats, by the way.

They are people who believe that capitalism -– their version -– and a “free market economy” are holy. And those systems require that government function almost exclusively to benefit the richest five percent (or less) of the population. Socialism is when government functions to benefit the majority of the population.

I worked with top corporate and bank executives for four-plus decades, and I know many people who inherited great wealth and power –- the “old money” elite. The statement above is not an exaggeration.

(An aside: They, through their wholly-owned politicians, such as George W. Bush, talk much about “spreading democracy” throughout the world. Democracy, as they use the word, is most accurately defined as corporate control of government. They want the engines of their wealth to control other countries as they mostly control ours. If they believed in democracy as most of us understand the term, would they be working so hard and spending so much money to suppress the votes of those in this country and abroad who disagree with their view of the world?)

I think, though I have no immediate evidence, that the right wing extremists were frightened by calls from the public for renewed regulation of financial businesses and restrictions on executive pay in bailed-out corporations and for other limits on the freedom of the elite to run things entirely as the choose. They see any restrictions on their behavior as sinful, literally evil.

They're calling for tax breaks for corporations and their major owners as part of the “rescue” package even as we are about to go hundreds of billions of dollars deeper into debt, but they are against tax breaks for anyone else.

When the politicians of the right talk about “protecting taxpayers,” as they are now, keep in mind which taxpayers they mean. It isn't you and me.

Also look closely at the structure of the bailout package. It is a design to further increase the wealth of the mighty by stealing from the rest of us. The insurance provisions and the “need” for consultants to design and run the bailout program –- endlessly lucrative jobs for the very people who created the crash -– is a way to hand out more licenses to steal billions of tax dollars. It's Halliburton in Iraq all over again.

The right wingers were and are angry because they believe the bailout doesn't yet contain enough for the billionaires, not because it isn't a real recovery plan.

Understand: the people of the extreme right are royalists. They believe in the sovereignty of money. They do not willingly tolerate any restrictions on the power of the very rich.

An honest plan to revive the economy and save the public from paying deeply and long for the crimes of the corporate and banking elite requires, among other things, a breaking up of the corporate/banking giants. Instead, our politicians are eagerly helping the giants grow bigger by eating their weakened competitors. We are very close to being directly ruled by the wealthy elite, very nearly to the point of entering America's post-Constitutional era. Or perhaps we're already through the door.

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For cogent and truly informed analyses of the bailout plan, check out these essays:

“Firing Back On the CRA Libel” by Sara Robinson on Blog for Our Future, http://ourfuture.org

“Recapitalize the banking system” by George Soros, from the Financial Times, http://www.ft.com

“Hyperventilating on the Bailout” by Charles R. Morris from the Washington Independent, http://washingtonindependent.com