Chris Floyd / Moscow Times – 2005-04-10 10:34:22
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8484.htm
(April 7, 2005) — Let’s face the facts. The game is over and we — the “reality-based community,” the believers in genuine democracy and law, the heirs of Jefferson and Madison, Emerson and Thoreau, the toilers and dreamers, all those who seek to rise above the beast within and shape the brutal chaos of existence into something higher, richer and imbued with meaning — have lost.
The better world we thought had been won out of the blood and horror of history — a realm of enlightenment that often found its best embodiment in the ideals and aspirations of the American Republic — is gone. It’s been swallowed by darkness, by ravening greed, by bestial spirits and by willful primitives who now possess overwhelming instruments of power and dominion.
A gang of such spirits seized control of the US government by illicit means in 2000 and maintained that control through rampant electoral corruption in 2004.
The re-election of President George W. Bush last November was a deliberately shambolic process that saw massive lockouts of opposition voters; unverifiable returns compiled by easily hackable machines operated by avowed corporate partisans of the ruling party; and vast discrepancies between exit polls and final results – gaps much larger than those that led elections in Ukraine and Georgia to be condemned as manipulated frauds.
Indeed, a panel of statisticians said last week that the odds of such a discrepancy occurring naturally were 959,000 to 1, the Akron Beacon-Journal reported.
Massive Manipulation of 2004 Election Documented
The copious documentation of the Bush fraud keeps growing. Last month, experts using actual machines and returns from the 2004 election showed Congress how a lone hacker could skew a precinct’s results by 100,000 votes without leaving a trace. More than 40 million votes in 30 states were cast on such computer systems, BlackBoxVoting noted.
Late last year, Congress heard sworn testimony from Florida programmer Clint Curtis, who created vote-rigging software in 2000 at the request of Tom Feeny, a Bush Family factotum. Feeny wanted Curtis (a fellow Republican) and his employer, Yang Enterprises, to produce untraceable programs that could “control the vote” as needed, investigator Brad Friedman reported. Feeny also told Curtis of Bush plans to “suppress the black vote” with “exclusion lists.”
This is exactly what happened. BBC investigator Greg Palast has shown that tens of thousands of legitimate African-American voters were deliberately “purged” from the rolls by a private Republican-controlled corporation hired by Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
Afterwards, Feeny — who had been Jeb’s running mate in his first gubernatorial campaign — was rewarded for his dutiful service with a plum congressional seat.
An Investigator’s Mysterious Death
In 2002, Raymond Lemme, a Florida state government inspector, took up Curtis’ charges, which included other corruption allegations involving Feeny, Yang Enterprises and a Yang employee charged with peddling military technology to the Chinese.
In June 2003, Lemme told Curtis he had “tracked the corruption all the way to the top” and that “the story would break in a few weeks.” On July 1, 2003, Lemme was found dead in a Georgia hotel room, just across the Florida border.
Local police ruled that Lemme, a happily married man eagerly planning his daughter’s wedding, had suddenly decided to slash his wrists. At first they said there were no photos of the death scene; but then the pictures turned up on the Internet and were confirmed as authentic by the embarrassed police. The photos clearly contradicted the original suicide report on several points — presenting evidence, for example, that Lemme had been beaten before his death.
Investigation of Death Shut Down
The investigation was reopened after Curtis’ Congressional testimony — and then abruptly shut down after local police spoke to a never-identified “someone” in the Florida state government.
Needless to say, nothing has been done to clarify the murk surrounding Lemme’s convenient death. Nor has there been any action toward rectifying the highly profitable degradation of the American electoral process — beyond the appointment of yet another “blue-ribbon panel” of Establishment worthies to oversee “election reform.”
The seriousness of this endeavor can be seen in the man appointed to co-chair the effort: James Baker, the notorious Bush family fixer (and Saudi bagman) who spearheaded the sabotage of the 2000 vote in Florida. Baker’s presence on the panel ensures that nothing will be done to lessen the ruling clique’s chokehold on power.
Gangsters Are In Charge
So let’s have no illusions about where we are. Gangsters are in charge, and nothing and no one will be allowed to challenge their dominion. They are waging aggressive war to cement their position and that of their allies: the energy barons, the arms merchants, the construction and services cartels, the investment bankers.
These power blocs now command monstrous resources and unfathomable profits; they can buy out, buy off or bury any force that opposes them. Meanwhile, they use the loot of the stolen Republic— its blood and treasure — as fuel for their ever-expanding war machine: Bush now has a “secret watch-list” of 25 more countries ripe for military intervention, the Financial Times reported.
With more war crimes afoot, last month Bush issued an official “National Defense Strategy” that openly declares “judicial processes” as one of the enemies confronting the United States, actually equating them with terrorism, The Associated Press reported.
Under Bush, ‘The Law Is Now the Enemy’
Law is “a strategy of the weak,” says the Bush Doctrine, in a chilling echo of Hitlerian machtpolitik: Might makes right. The judicial process must not be allowed to “constrain or shape” American behavior in any way, the gangsters declared.
Think of it: Law is now the enemy. Democracy, as we’ve seen above, is the enemy. This, the demented code of criminals and tyrants, has become the ruling doctrine of the United States — replacing the Constitution, replacing the noble struggle for liberty and enlightenment with the howl of the beast, with a freak show of avarice and death.
Annotations
News you won’t find on CNN:
• The Death of Raymond Lemme
Bradblog.com, March 8, 2005
• Clint Curtis Testifies Before Judiciary Committee Panel
Bradblog.com, Dec. 13, 2004
• Report to Judiciary Committee: Diebold Machines Hacked
Black Box Voting, March 8, 2005
• Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption
Akron Beacon Journal, April 1, 2005
• US Scatters Bases to Control Eurasia
Asia Times, March 30, 2005
• US Draws Up List of Unstable Countries
Financial Times, March 28, 2005
• Bush: US To Bear Burden of Iraq Costs
Associated Press, April 4, 2005
• Oil prices soar above 58 dollars for first time
Agence France Press, April 4, 2005
• US Taxpayers Give Lion’s Share To Military
PNN Online, April 4, 2005
• National Defense Strategy: Legal Challenges, Terrorism Threaten U.S.
Associated Press, March 18, 2005
• Defense Strategy OKs First Strikes
Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2005
• The Bush-Cheney Media Enterprises
AlterNet, April 3, 2005
• US relied on ‘drunken liar’ to justify Iraq war
The Observer, April 3, 2005
• Long Before WMD Panel, Evidence Showed Bush Wanted War Despite Intelligence
A Tiny Revolution, March 31, 2005
• If You Build It, They Will Kill
TomDispatch, April 1, 2005
• Military Bases Abroad are Expanding
The Nation, March 31, 2005
• Coordinated attack on your voting rights happening Now
Daily Kos, March 31, 2005
• Bechtel Sees Record Revenue in 2004
San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 2005
• The New Aristocracy
Providence Journal, March 28, 2005
• Top Bush Insider Joins Halliburton
Washington Examiner, March 22, 2005
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