thing that we can console ourselves with is that there was absolutely nothing we, the people, could do about it. We have no say about anything that goes on in our name in Washington DC. Our job must be to restore the power of our vote. Without it, we are helpless. There is no reason for the President or Congress to listen to us.
Our votes currently are meaningless, due to Bushite corporations--Diebold and ES&S--having gained control over the vote tabulation, during the 2001-2004 period, with SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code in the new electronic voting systems. This SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it--rendered the 2004 election invalid (and also several of the 2002 Congressional elections). These elections were completely non-transparent and unverifiable. They should not even be dignified with the word "election." No one among the public, and no one in government, can establish, by recount or audit, that those who were supposedly elected by means of SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code were legitimately chosen by the voters.
And compounding the utter violation of democratic principles in "trade secret," proprietary vote tabulation software is the complete lack of any kind of "paper trail" in one third of the country in 2004, added to the existing wholly inadequate auditing and recount procedures even where a "paper trail" of some kind exists.
The so-called "official results" of this SECRET, PROPRIETARY vote tabulation that occurred in 2004 is the ONLY evidence that George Bush holds office legitimately. All other evidence points strongly to a Bush loss in 2004, including--but by no means limited to--the independent national and state exit polls, which Kerry won handily, and whose results were ALTERED, by the TV networks on election night, to "fit" the "official results" of Diebold's and ES&S's secret formulae (Bush won).
In addition to this lack of legitimacy, the Bush regime has engaged in egregious violations of national and international law--including laws against torture and unjust war--massive looting of the federal treasury, and corruption on a scale that we have not seen (and that far exceeds) the Harding administration, harbinger of the Great Depression.
George Bush--or, rather, George Bush's handlers--appointing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in addition to a second justice replacing O'Connor, and the Bush Cartel's numerous other federal court appointments--are the most wrongful, illegitimate, disgusting and disastrous acts that we have seen during this junta, aside from the wrongful, illegitimate, disgusting, and disastrous invasion of Iraq and slaughter of tens of thousands of people.
These Bush Cartel court appointments will hamper or completely prevent the essential reforms that will soon be desperately needed to save our country from massive starvation, homelessness and unemployment, and will also hamper or prevent any efforts to restore our democracy and our civil rights, including our right to vote.
Clearly the banning of unverifiable electronic voting will be one of those efforts to restore democracy--and it will be facing a Supreme Court that will most certainly rule in favor of secret, corporate-controlled vote tabulation. This will retard the fight for transparent elections possibly for decades.
Another needed reform is stripping corporations of personhood--a bizarre fascist doctrine that is responsible for much of our current enslavement to our Corporate Rulers and war profiteers.
The list of potential catastrophic impacts of these Bush Cartel court appointments is very long--both as to preventing vital future reform, and as to undoing a half a century of progress in economic justice, civil rights and environmental regulation.
Our situation will be very similar to that faced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the early 1930s. With a third of our country unemployed, massive breadlines, people starving and homeless, complete economic collapse, and worldwide Depression, the Robber Baron-era appointments to the Supreme Court struck down reform after reform, proposed by FDR and passed by Congress, including the National Industrial Recovery Act, and many progressive labor laws, and was poised to declare even the Social Security Act as "unconstitutional."
The matter was resolved when FDR took the extraordinary measure of threatening to "pack" the Supreme Court (add to the number of justices, so that new, younger, more liberal appointments could be made--a power that Congress DOES HAVE, by the way), which prompted one of the "moderate" justices to switch sides on New Deal programs (and both Social Security and the National Labor Relations Acts were saved!).
The U.S. had been inflicted with some of the worst presidents we've ever seen, during the Robber Baron era--people who pushed "laissez faire" policies (no regulation of the "free market") much akin to the global corporate predation and "free piracy" we see today. These corrupt (McKinley, Harding), oblivious (Coolidge), stupid (Coolidge) or ineffective (Hoover) leaders permitted the country to be RUINED by the super-rich--who were idiotically holding "Beggars' Balls" in the Waldorf-Astoria on the eve of the Great Depression. Hoover (who was not without good instincts, but was sadly ineffective) in 1928 campaigned on the slogan, "A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage"! He, too, blindly believed in the "free market," AND in VOLUNTEERISM as the answer to massive poverty. (Where have we heard that before?)
(Coolidge: "We do not need more intellectual power, we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge, we need more character. We do not need more government, we need more culture. We do not need more law, we need more religion." --while the immoral glitterati danced the night away at the Waldorf-Astoria dressed up as BEGGARS!)
Well, we're right back where we were THEN, in many ways. And the scariest part of it all is that even FDR's reforms--involving massive government employment programs--while they were saving peoples' lives and giving people hope, were slow in generating economic recovery (not helped by the obstructions of the pro-rich, pro-big business Supreme Court), and only WW II (a huge retooling of industry, and huge government subsidies of industry) prevented a final collapse of the U.S. and all western economies.
Our economy has been on a war footing ever since, with continued huge taxpayer subsidization of the military industries, and, now, with the Bush Cartel, vast subsidies of every kind for all U.S.-based global corporate predators, and zero accountability in the military (or any) sector. (At least FDR and the New Dealers rode herd on industry and punished war profiteering.)
Another scary fact is that an FDR--someone genuinely devoted to serving the majority of people, especially the poor and downtrodden--could not be elected today. They counted votes by hand in those days, and although there was plenty of election fraud and vote stealing committed by both sides, they pretty much canceled each other out, and--critically important--it could not occur on the scale that it now occurs with non-transparent electronic voting, at the speed of light, unseeable by the human eye--one hacker, a couple of minutes, switching thousands of votes, and leaving no trace.
Now we have ONE PARTY--or rather, the far rightwing of one party--in total control of vote tabulation. We shouldn't be surprised at the result.
If we want our democracy back--and if we are to have any hope of combating the fascist rulings of a Bush Cartel-appointed Supreme Court and federal judiciary which we are going to be facing for decades to come--we MUST recover our right to vote, however we can.
The BIPARTISAN corruption of our election system, wrought by the $4 billion electronic voting boondoggle (provided by Bush's "pod people" in Congress), is a formidable obstacle to election reform. It is at least half the story of why the Democrats have gone along with this INSANE takeover of our elections by Bushite corporations. (I think the other part of the story is war profiteering corruption by pro-war Democrats.)
Our best chance at reform is at the state/local level, where the power over election systems still resides, and where ordinary people still have some influence.
My advice: Throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!
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An excellent account of the FDR and the Supreme Court:
http://www.crf-usa.org/bria/bria10_4.htmlA quick rundown on "the Constitution in Exile"--Herbert Hoover's Constitution (pre-FDR Constitution) that fascists have been trying to re-install, beginning in the Reagan era, through judicial appointments:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sunstein.html
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