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--or rather, the multinational corporations and war profiteers who rule over us--are directly responsible for much of the dysfunction in the world right now, including the world's failure to address the climate change crisis, the Great Looting (induced Crash of '08) and the vast waste of resources, trashing of international law and human carnage and environmental horrors of completely unnecessary, unjust, corporate oil wars.
Democracy is the best system of government ever devised by humanity for correcting the course of the ship of state when it threatens to founder. Our democracy has been deliberately disabled and cannot correct course. And it is so obvious to me WHAT the most immediate problem is, that I don't understand how everybody can't SEE IT, except that it has been so black-holed in the corporate 'news,' and it is this: ALL of our votes are now 'counted' largely by ONE, private, far rightwing connected corporation--ES&S, which just bought out Diebold--using 'TRADE SECRET' code--code that you and I are forbidden to review--with virtually no audit/recount controls.
This is not the only thing wrong with our democracy, but it is the most most recent and the most lethal manifestation of corporate control of our elections: DIRECT, **PRIVATE**, CORPORATE control of the very tabulation of our votes!
We are fast running out of options to change this. It was pretty changeable until recently, because the Anthrax Congress--which did this to us--DIDN'T require local/state jurisdictions to buy and use corporate voting systems. (They merely provided a $3.9 billion e-voting boondoggle and filthy lobbying did the rest.) So it was possible to get rid of these diabolical machines at the local/state level, given enough local citizen pressure, and go back to TRANSPARENT vote counting. The problem was Congress, the President and the Supreme Court--the federal government. The Corporates had concentrated on getting their looters and lackeys into federal positions and hadn't done as much election theft damage at the state/local level. Thus, ordinary people, who have more potential influence at the state/local level, had a "window of opportunity" to go after local officials and demand a return to vote counting that everyone can SEE and understand. But I'm afraid that that window is fast closing with the (s)election of rightwing jihadists like Walker in Wisconsin. None of these radical wrecking ball politicians were actually elected. This is what we must understand. The system in place all across the USA now is easily--EASILY!--riggable, at lightning speed, with almost no possibility of detection, by...
One.
Private.
FAR rightwing-connected.
Corporation.
Using.
'TRADE SECRET.'
Code.
With.
Virtually.
No.
Audit/recount.
Controls.
This coup d'etat occurred mostly during the 2002-2004, and with the complicity of our party leadership. That is the horrible part. We are absolutely on our own, as to fixing this. And, until we fix it, we really don't have a democracy any more.
And this is a problem for the WHOLE WORLD--because the U.S. has the biggest war machine in the world--unprecedented destructive power; it is the biggest polluter in the world; it is currently the biggest bully in the world, interfering all over the planet, not for "freedom and democracy" but for its opposite--corporate rule. The U.S. has committed a terrible, terrible atrocity in Iraq, for which no one can hold it accountable. It has smashed the Geneva Conventions to pieces, on matters like torture. It is a rogue state--a terrorist state--with out-of-control war profiteers. And the tragic part is that, WITH democracy, the U.S. could have been a leader in pollution control, green energy, world peace, international problem solving and social justice. We had that potential. And that's what our people wanted and still want. We want to be "good guys." We want to be helpful. We want fairness. We want everyone to have a chance. We want to be proud of our country, our communities and ourselves. We have deep traditions of democracy and social justice that have emerged and re-emerged over hundreds of years and go back thousands of years in our mother cultures. We don't want to be an empire. We don't want to aggress. We don't want "robber barons" running things. We want a "New Deal" for everybody. That's who we are. We are LIBERAL country--believers in education and upward mobility. But we have been over-ruled.
Our multinational corporate/war profiteer rulers have been disabling the mechanisms of democracy since Reagan. Some of the first targets were labor unions, small savers (in the S&L deregulation), and the fair tax code. People with secure jobs, decent wages, savings and fair taxes have the wherewithal to participate in society and furthermore, those who don't have these things--the poor--can aspire to them, in a good society--and thus, they, too, participate. This is how good people are elected--leaders who understand and represent the principle of the general welfare. The Reaganites began dismantling all of this. They and our corporate rulers also pulled off the first major corporate 'news' coup d'etat with all their bullcrap about Saint Reagan--one of the most horrible U.S. presidents ever, who not only destroyed fiscal responsibility, shredded the fair tax code and engaged in an egregiously illegal war--one expressly forbidden by Congress--effectively ENDING the U.S. Constitution, then and there (the "Iran-Contra War" against Nicaragua)--he also supported the slaughter of TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND MAYAN VILLAGERS in Guatemala and Central America--a genocidal atrocity for which he was given A COMPLETE FREE PASS by the corporate media.
Horrible, horrible man--the first assassin of our democracy. That's when Cheney and Rumsfeld got their start. Anyway, this SHIT was turned into some kind of "saint" BY THE MEDIA, and we have never recovered from this, as a lied-to people, and things have only gotten worse, with the corporate media now black-holing and covering up the corporate take-over of the entire election system. The looting and destruction is so bad now that complete control of the media was not enough. The far rightwing had to have direct control of the vote count to keep Bush-Cheney in office in 2004 and to accomplish all that they have accomplished since, as to bankrupting our government and "drowning it in the bathtub" (as Grover Norquist put it) and turning our country literally into "Alice in Wonderland," as to the utter lunacy of far rightwing rule.
Obviously, we have huge problems in the corpo-fascist media and in the utterly filthy campaign contribution system--both so extreme as to be almost unbelievable. But we can't even BEGIN to address either of those problems, or any other problem, without transparent vote counting. It is the bottom line of democracy. We must restore it. We must!
Recovery of democracy in the United States of America could be key to the recovery of our civilization in general. Humanity CAN solve ALL of the problems that we face, given the flexibility, creativity and empowerment of truly democratic government, which rallies the energies of ALL. Democracy has been the KEYSTONE of our civilization's social advances in the past. IF WE CAN RESTORE DEMOCRATIC CONTROL **HERE,** in the once fabled ikon of democracy, the USA, it would inspire the world. That inspiration is now coming from Latin America. (And, believe me, transparent vote counting is the key difference.) But how about if we join them, hm? What a powerhouse of change and good influence in the world the western hemisphere would be if the U.S. would join Latin America's leftist democracy movement! To do that, we need to get our election system back.
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