John Kerry, Please Count Ohio's Votes Now

2008, Palast has Rove's e-mails about GOP plans for 2008, a repeat of 2004 "caging" lists (5.00 / 1)

http://www.gregpalas...
Amy Goodman and Greg Palast
Mom’s Day broadcast

“I have Karl Rove’s emails”

Dollars & Sense: In the new edition of your book, ARMED MADHOUSE, you report on the theft of the 2008 election. How do know what they’re doing? Any way to stop them?

Palast: I know because I have Karl Rove’s emails. No kidding. He and his team aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. They sent copies of their plans to GeorgeWBush.ORG instead of GeorgeWBush.COM addresses — and, heh heh, they ended up in my in-box. Who says this job ain’t fun?

Dollars & Sense: Bush fired eight prosecutors. You were behind the scenes on that story long before it broke in the US. What are they still withholding from us?

Palast: Look, it’s all about VOTES. You’ll see that the prosecutor that Karl Rove insisted in putting in place is a slithery character named Tim Griffin. He’s the guy I busted as the spider-mind behind the “caging lists” which purged thousands of Black voters. The prosecutors fired, as you’ll see in Armed Madhouse, include those, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, who refused to bring phony cases of fraud against legitimate voters. It’s a matter of economics: the Republican party is systematically knocking out lower-income voters; that makes their purges racially biased — but my data show that’s just the effect of hunting down and attacking the ballot power of working class and poor voters. Disenfranchisement is class war by other means.

..........

http://www.freepress...

RFK: Rove and Rove's brain, 'Should be in jail,' not in office

by Greg Palast
May 9, 2007

NEW YORK -- Voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for prison time for the new US Attorney for Arkansas, Timothy Griffin and investigation of Griffin's former boss, Karl Rove, chief political advisor to President Bush.

"Timothy Griffin," said Kennedy, “who is the new US attorney in Arkansas, was actually the mastermind behind the voter fraud efforts by the Bush Administration to disenfranchise over a million voters through 'caging' techniques - which are illegal."

[Hear Kennedy on Griffin, Rove and 'caging lists' at www.GregPalast.com]

Kennedy based his demand on the revelations by BBC reporter Greg Palast in the new edition of his book, "Armed Madhouse." On one page of the book, Palast reproduces a copy of a confidential Bush-Cheney campaign email, dated August 26, 2004, in which Griffin directs Republican operatives to use the 'caging' lists.

This is one of the emails subpoenaed by Congress but supposedly "lost" by Rove's office. Palast obtained 500 of these, fifty with 'caging' lists attached.

'Caging' lists are "absolutely illegal" under the Voting Rights Act, noted Kennedy on his Air America program, Ring of Fire. The 1965 law makes it a felony crime to challenge voters when race is a factor in the targeting. African-American voters comprised the bulk of the 70,000 voters 'caged' in a single state, Florida.

Palast wrote in his book, "Here's how the scheme worked. The Bush campaign mailed out letters," particularly targeting African-American soldiers sent overseas. When the letters sent to the home addresses of the soldiers came back "undeliverable" because the servicemen were in Baghdad or elsewhere, the Republican Party would, "challenge the voter's registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted."

The Republicans successfully challenged "at least one million" votes of minority voters in the 2004 election.

Kennedy, a voting rights attorney, fumed, "What he [Griffin] did was absolutely illegal and he should be in jail. Instead [Griffin] was rewarded with the US Attorney's office."

"They [Griffin, Rove and their confederates at the RNC] knew it was illegal."

snip

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by: ProveOurDemocracy @ Sun May 13, 2007 at 16:42:27 PM UTC

John Kerry, Please count Ohio's votes in order to repair the serious damage done by the GOP (0.00 / 0)

from:
http://www.democracy...

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

"The Worse Things Get in Iraq, the More Privatized This War Becomes, The More Profitable This War Becomes"
- Naomi Klein on the Privatization of the State

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue to look at the issue of Iraq and the US occupation, we turn to the acclaimed author and journalist Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein is a widely read columnist for The Nation magazine and the London Guardian, author of the best-selling book No Logo, more recently, Fences and Windows. She came to New York for the launch of Jeremy Scahill's book on Blackwater and spoke at the Ethical Culture Society on the privatization of military and the state, putting it in a historical context.

NAOMI KLEIN: This drive to the privatize every aspect of the state of government is about a 35-year-old campaign. Many people date it, many historians date it to the 1973 coup in Chile, which is something that is interesting in terms of Jeremy’s research, because he talks about how Blackwater are now hiring Chileans to go to Iraq, and I’ll let him do that. But the first example of the attempt to build a fully privatized corporate utopia was in Chile in 1973 after Pinochet’s coup, when he joined up with a team of economists from the University of Chicago to engage in that experiment.

It is a different kind of colonial project. In Latin America, this project, which is often called neoliberalism, is referred to as neocolonialism. The first stage of colonialism was the opening of the veins of Latin America, as Eduardo Galeano describes it, the pillaging of raw resources, the exporting of raw resources. The second stage of colonialism -- and, of course, that first stage never fully goes away -- was pillaging the state. What had been constructed in the aftermath of the Great Depression and during the post-war boom years -- the construction of healthcare systems, education systems, roadways, railways -- but this is really what was launched in Chile with the help of the Chicago boys: the strip mining of the state itself.

The way I imagine this corporate project, this privatization project, is if we imagine the state as a kind of an octopus with all of these limbs. And for the past thirty years, and certainly in this country since Reagan, what the privatization campaign has really been doing is lopping off the limbs of the state -- the phone system, the roadways, these sort of non-essential services, if you will. And after you've chopped off all the limbs, all you have left is the center, is what they call the core.

And what the Bush administration has really been doing is going for the core, privatizing those core essential government services that are so inherently part of what we think of as the state, that it almost seems impossible to imagine that they could be privatized, like the government itself, like cutting Social Security checks, like welfare, like prisons, like the army, which is where Blackwater fits in.

What's so extraordinary about what has happened in Iraq -- and Amy mentioned the “Baghdad Year Zero” article -- is that you really have all of these layers of colonialism and neocolonialism, this quest for privatization, forming a kind of a perfect storm in that country. On the one hand, you have sort of old-school colonial pillage, which is, let's go for the oil. And as many of you know, Iraq has a new oil law. It’s passed through cabinet, hasn't yet passed through parliament. But, really, it legalizes pillage. It legalizes pillage. It legalizes the extraction of 100% of the profits from Iraq's oil industry, which is precisely the conditions that created the wave of Arab nationalism and the reclaiming of the resources in the 1950s through the ’70s. So it’s an undoing of that process and a straight-up resource grab, old-school colonialism.

Layered on top of that, you have sort of colonialism 2.1, which is what I was researching when I was in Iraq, which is the looting of the Iraqi state, what was built up under the banner of Arab nationalism, the industry, the factories. The kind of rapid-fire, shock therapy-style strip-mining privatization that we saw in the former Soviet Union in the ’90s, that was the idea, that was Plan A for Iraq, that the US would just go in there with Blackwater guarding Paul Bremer and would sell off all of Iraq’s industries. So you had the old-school colonial, then you had the new school.

And then you had the post-modern privatization, which was the idea that the US military was actually going to war, the US Army was going to war, to loot itself, which is a post-modern kind of innovation, right? If we remember, Thomas Friedman told us less than a decade ago that no two countries with a McDonald's have ever gone to war. Now, we go to war with McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King, in tow. And so, the process of waging war is a form of self-pillage. Not only is Iraq being pillaged, but the United States coffers of this government are being pillaged. So we have these three elements, all converging this perfect storm over this country.

And one of the things that I think is most important for progressives to challenge is the discourse that everything in Iraq is a disaster. I think we need to start asking and insisting, disaster for who, because not everybody is losing. It’s certainly a disaster for the Iraqi people. It's certainly a disaster for US taxpayers. But what we have seen -- and it’s extremely clear if we track the numbers -- is that the worse things get in Iraq, the more privatized this war becomes, the more profitable this war becomes for companies like Lockheed Martin, Bechtel, and certainly Blackwater. There is a steady mission creep in Iraq, where the more countries pull out, the more contractors move in, which Jeremy has documented so well and will talk more about.

The danger. These are the stakes that I think we need to understand. And I really do want to keep this brief, so that we have a fruitful discussion afterwards. What are the stakes here? The stakes could not be higher. What we are losing is the incentive, the economic incentive, for peace, the economic incentive for stability. When you can create such a booming economy around war and disaster, around destruction and reconstruction, over and over and over again, what is your peace incentive?

There was a phrase that came out of the Davos conference this year. Every year, there’s always a big idea to emerge from the World Economic Summit in Davos. This year, the big idea was the Davos dilemma. Now, what is the Davos dilemma? The Davos dilemma is this: for decades, it's been conventional wisdom that generalized mayhem was a drain on the global economy, that you could have an individual shock or a crisis or a war that could be exploited for privatization, but on the whole -- and this was the Thomas Friedman thesis -- there needed to be stability in order to have steady economic growth; the Davos dilemma is that it's no longer true. You can have generalized mayhem, you can have wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, threats of nuclear war with Iran, a worsening of the Israeli occupation, a deepening of violence against Palestinians, you can have a terror in the face of global warming, you could have increased blowback from resource wars, you can have soaring oil prices, but, lo and behold, the stock market just goes up and up and up.

In fact, there's an index called the Guns-to-Caviar index, which for seventeen years has been measuring an inverse relationship between the sale of fighter jets and executive luxury jets. And for seventeen years, this index, the Guns-to-Caviar index -- the guns are the fighter jets, the caviar are the executive jets -- has found that when fighter jets go up, executive jets go down. When executive jets go up, fighter jets go down. But all of a sudden, they're both going up, which means that there’s a lot of guns being sold, enough guns to buy a hell of a lot of caviar. And Blackwater is, of course, at the center of this economy.

The only way to combat an economy that has eliminated the peace incentive, of course, is to take away their opportunities for growth. And their opportunities for growth are ongoing climate instability and ongoing geopolitical instability. Their threats -- the only thing that can challenge their economy is relative geopolitical and climatic peace and stability, so I suppose we have our work cut out for us to fight the war profiteers.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, her forthcoming book is called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here ( https://store.democr... ) for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.

U.S. government 'outsourcing its brain'

  03/30/2007 @ 3:57 pm
  Filed by RAW STORY
  http://rawstory.com/...

  Due to its increasing practice of contracting out to private firms and agencies, the U.S. government is quickly losing its expertise and competence in vital national security and defense programs, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

  "Since the 2001 terrorist attacks and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the federal government's demand for complex technology has soared," writes by Bernard Wysocki, Jr. for the Journal. "But Washington often doesn't have the expertise to take on new high-tech projects, or the staff to oversee them.

  "As a result," he continues, "officials are increasingly turning to contractors, in particular the hundreds of companies in Tysons Corner and the surrounding Fairfax County that operate some of the government's most sensitive and important undertakings."

  The number of private federal contractors has now risen to 7.5 million, which is four times greater than the federal workforce itself, the report indicates. Such a trend is leading the government to what Wysocki calls the "outsourcing [of] its brain.

  The shift to private firms has not been without its problems, however, with faulty work and government waste becoming rampant.

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by: ProveOurDemocracy @ Sun May 13, 2007 at 17:49:25 PM UTC

So much to recover (0.00 / 0)

I should look it up again, but when one megachurch Preacher publicly forswore against endorsing GOP candidates, he lost membership--but, only 20%. The rest were just fine with not having to be told to follow the GOP.

Good Stewart Evangelicals and Good Samaritan Fundamentalists are not the property of Dominionists.

from: http://www.democracy...

  AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the religious right and the rise of it in this country. A new book by Chris Hedges is called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. It investigates the highly organized and well-funded dominionist movement. The book looks at their agenda, examines the movement's origins and motivations and uncovers its ideological underpinnings. American Fascists argues that dominionism seeks absolute power in a Christian state. According to Hedges, the movement bears a strong resemblance to the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s.

  Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for many years, where he won a Pulitzer Prize. He's also the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Losing Moses on the Freeway. Chris Hedges has a Master's degree in theology from Harvard University and is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and joins me in studio now. Welcome to Democracy Now!

  CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you.

  AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Why did you write this book?

  CHRIS HEDGES: Anger. I mean, I grew up in the Church and, of course, as you mentioned, graduated from seminary, and I think these people have completely perverted and distorted and manipulated the Christian message into something that is the very antithesis of certainly what Jesus preached in the Gospels.

  AMY GOODMAN: Who are "these people"?

  CHRIS HEDGES: These are -- you know, they're not -- we use terms like "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" to describe them, and I think that those are incorrect terms.

  Traditional fundamentalists always called on believers to remove themselves from the contaminants of secular society, shun involvement in politics. Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham's always warned followers to keep their distance from political power. He, of course, was burned by Richard Nixon, came to Nixon's defense and then when it publicly came out that Nixon lied, it taught a lesson to Graham.

  This is a new movement, as embodied by people like James Dobson or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, who call for the creation of a Christian state, who talk about attaining secular power. And they are more properly called dominionists or Christian reconstructionists, although it's not a widespread term, but they're certainly not traditional fundamentalists and not traditional evangelicals. They fused the language and iconography of the Christian religion with the worst forms of American nationalism and then created this sort of radical mutation, which has built alliances with powerful rightwing interests, including corporate interests, and made tremendous inroads over the last two decades into the corridors of power.

  AMY GOODMAN: Why the term "dominionist"?

  CHRIS HEDGES: It come out of Genesis, you know, where God gives humankind dominion over creation. It's articulated by ideologues, such as Rousas Rushdoony, Francis Schaeffer and others, and essentially is a new concept within the radical Christian right, and it's used sparingly. And some dominionists don't like the term, but I think it denotes or is probably a better term for denoting those people who want to take political power.

  AMY GOODMAN: On the back of your book, Chris, is a quote from your professor at Harvard, Dr. James Luther Adams, who said that in a few decades we would all be fighting "Christian fascists." Who was he, and why did he think this?

  CHRIS HEDGES: James Luther Adams was my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School. He had spent the years 1935 and 1936 in Germany working with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Confessing Church or anti-Nazi church and eventually was picked up by the Gestapo and told to leave the country. He came back -- and this was in the early 1980s, when I was in seminary -- and saw the articulation of this new political religion, this religion that talked about seizing control of mainstream denominations, as well as institutions, creating a parallel media empire through Christian radio and broadcasting, and ultimately taking control of the government itself.

  And he understood, in a visceral way, how when countries fall into despair -- of course, this began -- it was the time that began the assault on the American working class, which has been accelerated and essentially left tens of millions of people within our own country dispossessed -- he understood how demagogues use that despair. And I think we can say there, in many ways, has been a kind of Weimarization of the American working class. And he saw what we were doing through globalization, what we were doing to our working class and our middle class, coupled with the rise of these so-called Christian demagogues, as a frightening and toxic combination, which, if left unchecked, would destroy our democracy.

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by: ProveOurDemocracy @ Sun May 13, 2007 at 18:12:43 PM UTC

Good Steward, pardon my misspelling, Good Steward Evangelicals and Good Samaritan Fundamentalists beware of Dominionists (0.00 / 0)

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by: ProveOurDemocracy @ Mon May 14, 2007 at 23:50:02 PM UTC

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