News of the Month

December 11, 2004

The biggest news of the past month continues to be the Presidential election. You’ve heard all sorts of “analyses” on the corporate media about why Bush “won.” Well, the fact is, he didn’t win – he, and his neo-con handlers, stole the election … again. This time, though, it wasn’t just Florida; it was all over the country.

I’ll get to some details in a bit; but first, listen to this quotation from the leader’s speeches:

“The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality. Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press ... in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past few years.”

Sound familiar? It could have been taken straight from Bush’s megalomaniac ravings after he decided that he had a “mandate” from the people with “values” around the country. But it wasn’t. It was taken instead from The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, 1922-1939, Volume 1, pages 871-872, published in 1942 by the Oxford University Press of London.

Last month Brad Friedman, a freelance writer, investigative blogger, and software designer, published on his blog, called www.bradblog.com, an affidavit he obtained from a Florida computer programmer, Clint Curtis, who claims in it that he designed and built a “vote rigging” software program at the behest of then Florida Representative, now U.S. Congressman, Republican Tom Feeney of Florida's 24th Congressional District. In his affidavit, Curtis says that as a programmer at Yang Enterprises he was present at company meetings where Feeney was present “on at least a dozen occasions.”

As BradBlog reports, Feeney had run in 1994 as Jeb Bush's running mate in Jeb’s unsuccessful first run for Florida Governor. During the time Clint Curtis was at Yang, Feeney was a corporate counsel and registered lobbyist for that company. At the same time, he was a Florida state representative. Later he became Speaker of the Florida House, then was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002. He’s now a member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

Curtis says that Feeney “was very specific in the design and specifications required for this program.” "He detailed, in his own words, that (a) the program needed to be touch-screen capable, (b) the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment, and (c) the programming to accomplish this needed to stay hidden even if the source code was inspected.” Though there was no problem with the first two requirements, Curtis explained to the Congressman that it would be “virtually impossible to hide such code written to change the voting results if anyone is able to review the uncompiled source code.” He was asked at the meeting by the company owner, Mrs. Li Woan Yang, to build the prototype anyway.

Upon delivery of the software design and documentation CD to Mrs. Yang, Mr. Curtis again explained to her that it would be impossible to hide routines created to manipulate the vote if anybody would be able to inspect the uncompiled source code. Mrs. Yang then told him, “You don’t understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in South Florida.”

In a bit we’re going to read several articles about the vote fraud committed all around the country by the Republicans in power. Here are links to the articles:

· An excellent article by journalist Greg Palast, summarizing the frauds

· An article from BlackBoxVoting.org on how the election was hacked

· An editorial by a British writer entitled “God Help America”

And who, you ask, is dong something about this? Not the Democrats – and certainly not their nominee, John Kerry. Just as Gore did in 2000, Kerry folded without a peep, and accepted the “victory” by the Bush junta. Even though there are a lot of votes yet to be counted – most importantly in Ohio, which could theoretically change the outcome of the election – Mr. Kerry seems perfectly content to take his “rewards” and go back to the Senate. Of course, you already know that even if all the uncounted votes in Ohio were for Kerry, that wouldn’t change anything. The Republican Ohio has been stalling the recount; their Supreme Court finally told him on December 3, but there’s no way it can be done now until after the Electoral College meets on December 13 to rubber-stamp Bush’s second coup d’etat.

As to who is doing something about it, I’ll point you two places. First is Bev Harris, who created and maintains the web site BlackBoxVoting.org. She has filed Freedom of Information requests in all 50 states for detailed election returns. What will that show? Well, the resistance she’s been encountering to her requests is a good indication of just how little the people in power want the truth to come out.

The other team trying to force a meaningful recount in Ohio consists of Austin’s own Libertarian Presidential candidate, Michael Badnarik, and the Green Party nominee, former Texan David Cobb. Let me take a quick aside here, especially for you Libertarians – or any Greens – who might be watching the show tonight. You and I both know that there are some serious philosophical differences between us and the Greens; but right now there’s a lot more uniting us than dividing us. Yes, someday the Greens and the Libertarians might be in a position to seriously campaign against each other; and yes, when that day comes both of us might be at each other like cats and dogs.

But right now the Libertarians and the Greens have to make common cause, as our two parties’ standard-bearers are doing right now, against the old corrupt Republocrat politics of money, power, and privilege. As long as the Republocrats have a strangle-hold on the way this country is run, as long as they can send our young men and women off to fight an illegal war of aggression for their oil hegemony, as long as they can steal elections from the American people, then the Greens and the Libertarians are allies.

OK; but what else has been going on out there in the world while we’re focused on the crimes of our “leaders”? Well, in Palestine, things are proceeding pretty much as usual – Israeli soldiers are shooting and killing Palestinian children for the crime of playing in their own back yards, for instance. Listen to this report from Al-Jazeera Arab television network on November 28:

“Israeli forces have shot and seriously wounded a four-year-old Palestinian child in Rafah, in southern Gaza, eyewitnesses and medical sources said.

“Palestinian medical sources listed Shayma Hasan Abu Shammala in critical condition after she was hit by several bullets fired by an Israeli soldier manning a military tower near the Egyptian-Gaza borders on Sunday.

“Muawiya Hasanain, head of the emergency department at the Palestinian health ministry, said the child was transferred to the European Hospital in Gaza due to the gravity of her condition.

“Eyewitnesses said the child was playing in the backyard of her home when the soldier opened fire on her.”

The report continues:

“Also on Sunday, a Palestinian boy died of wounds he sustained when an Israeli explosive device exploded near his home in Rafah at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources reported.

“The boy, identified as 16-year-old Mahmud Said Qishta, was said to be playing outside his home in Rafah earlier this week when he inadvertently stepped on an explosive device left behind by the Israeli army.

“Qishta was seriously wounded and transferred to the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, where he succumbed to his wounds on Sunday morning.

“Palestinians and human-rights groups often complain that Israeli forces operating in and around Palestinian population centres deliberately plant explosive devices in places where Palestinian children usually play.”

So why were these children killed? Listen:

“Many Israeli soldiers have begun to admit publicly that they are often given explicit orders to shoot Palestinian civilians, including children, when seen entering or approaching a certain ‘danger zone’.

“The charges were made … after an Israeli TV station broadcast a conversation between an Israeli officer and other troops in which the officer said, ‘Anything that is mobile, any thing that moves in the zone, even if it is a three-year-old, needs to be killed.’

“Incidentally, the Palestinian population is not informed of the existence of such ‘death zones’.”

Israel is only number two in the world race for the world’s most monstrous terrorist nation – behind the United States – so they try harder.

Then, of course, there’s our illegal war of aggression in Iraq. You probably know that by now over 1,250 Americans and over 15,000 Iraqi civilians have been murdered in that obscene war. (And that doesn’t even count the tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children that died as a direct result of our genocidal “embargo” of medical supplies for Iraq between Oil War I and Oil War II.)

But the corporations that control our government – and, indirectly, theirs – keeps coming up with new and different ways to help its investors profit from oppressing the poor people of that most unfortunate of nations. An example? The American administrator there has updated Iraq's intellectual property law to “meet current internationally-recognized standards of protection.” According to the updated law, saving seeds for next year's harvest – which has been the standard farming practice for thousands of years of human civilization and was done by 97% of Iraqi farmers in 2002 – is now illegal. Instead, farmers will have to obtain a yearly license for genetically modified seeds from American corporations. These GM seeds have typically been modified from plants developed over thousands of generations by indigenous farmers like the Iraqis, shared freely among farmers.

And, of course, as a result of this and all the other indignities we are forcing on Iraq and Arabs in general, the war against United States aggression is spreading. This Reuters report comes from Jeddah, in the “friendly” nation of Saudi Arabia, last Monday:

“Attackers struck the U.S. consulate in the Saudi city of Jeddah on Monday, setting the building on fire and exchanging fire with security forces. … A Western executive, quoting officials inside the building, said attackers infiltrated the complex and threw hand grenades. ‘Several men breached U.S. and Saudi security and lobbed one or several grenades at the building,’ he said. … Apart from bomb attacks on foreign targets in Saudi Arabia, gunmen have also shot dead several Americans and Europeans in a campaign to drive foreigners from the birthplace of Islam.”

You’d think they don’t like us over there. Just because our government used the 9/11 murders as an excuse to attack and nearly destroy a nation that had nothing to do with that atrocity, they seem out to get us for some reason. And of course, we’re protecting the young men and women we’ve sent over there to do our killing for us – right? Wrong. Our Defensive Secretary, Donald Rumsfield went over to Iraq earlier this week, and held a question-and-answer session with some of the soldiers and reservists over there. Here’s the American-Statesman’s report of what happened:

“Spc. Thomas Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit scheduled to roll into Iraq this week, was the first to voice his concerns, saying that soldiers had to scrounge through local landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass – what they called hillbilly armor – to bolt to their trucks. ‘Why don't we have those resources readily available to us?’ Wilson asked Rumsfeld, drawing cheers and applause from many of the 2,300 soldiers assembled in a cavernous hangar here to meet the secretary.

“In his answer, Rumsfeld said that adding more armor to trucks and battle equipment didn't make them impervious to attack. ‘If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and a tank can (still) be blown up,’ he said. ‘And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up.’

“A few minutes later, a soldier from the Idaho National Guard's 116th Armor Cavalry Brigade asked Rumsfeld what he and the Army were doing ‘to address shortages and antiquated equipment’ that will affect National Guard soldiers heading to Iraq. Rumsfeld seemed taken aback by the question, and a murmur began spreading through the ranks before he silenced it. ‘Now, settle down, settle down,’ he said. ‘Hell, I'm an old man, it's early in the morning, and I'm gathering my thoughts here.’ “

Our soldiers don’t have the proper equipment to protect their lives, but that “old man” has the right to protect his reputation – against the truth. After that shameful performance, every veteran out there should be enraged at what this nation is doing to its young men and women who put their lives on the line – for the Bush’s investorss’ oil profits.

Finally, let’s remember that, even though the Republicans did steal the election this year, there were still a whole lot of people out there who actually voted for the war criminals who are running this country. They claim they did it because of “values” – even “Christian values.” They’re lying. The “Christ” from whose title “Christian” came would have lambasted these hypocrites before they could even get the words all the way out of their mouths.

“Values,” my left head! Values like bigotry, fake morality, and arrogance. These people would rather let women die at the hands of back-alley butchers than let them choose a clean, safe abortion. (Of course, that only applies to poor women; the rich ones can afford to fly to Mexico.) The hypocrites are doing their best to keep our young people ignorant of the facts of sex, and so condemn them to a long, painful death from sexually transmitted diseases for the “crime” of being sexually active and not knowing how to protect themselves. It’s strange, isn’t it, that for these victims of cranial-anal juxtaposition, the only “sins” they recognize are sexual. Jerry Fallwell said recently that he’d like to hunt the “terrorists” down and murder every one of them. Good Christian charity there, all right.

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Because of the new structure of “Live and Let Live” that starts next month, I’m not sure when I’ll be back on the “air” again; so let me close this, my last regular “News of the Month” editorial by saying don’t let the bastards get you down. Yes, we’ve been taken over – again – by the anti-freedom junta that controls Bush. Yes, our air, water, forests, oceans, and rivers are going to be raped by the forces of profit-over-people. Yes, we are going to continue “destroying Iraq in order to save it” and widening our expansionist wars to other oil-rich nations. And yes, our liberties are going to take a beating from which they may never recover. But together, we still have power. Together, we can stand and say no to the forces that are trying to turn this nation of free people into an empire of pawns.

If you love freedom – and you don’t have to be a Libertarian to do that – then decide what action you’re going to take, and take it. Maybe you’ll decide not to be their cannon fodder, and not join the “reserves;” maybe you’ll stand in front of the Capitol on Friday evenings in silent protest of our illegal wars; maybe you’ll refuse to pay your war taxes; and maybe you’ll come up with something entirely new that’ll be more effective than anything we’ve thought of yet. But whatever it is, do it. Remember that our Declaration of Independence says:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (all people) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, …. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

We’re there, friends. Think about it. And then take action – whatever action your conscience tells you to do. But whatever you do, don’t just sit back and say, “Someone will do it.” You are the “someone;” we are the “someone.” It’s up to us.