This presents many problems for us, especially if our "defense" doesn't work. But even if it works perfectly, that is no reason not to work with other countries to decide how we will keep the world safe. Science has its place, defense has its place and diplomacy has its place. The Shrubbies believe only in the second of these three, and the time they spend alienating foreign countries is precious time we could be using to advance the cause of peace in this world.
©2001 Joe Ronzburg

To Russia With Love And $15 Billion
By Greg Palast

Here's a hot idea: Why don't we send 10,000 tons of high level uranium waste to Russia? You'd rather not? Not until you buy your lead suit?

OK then, how about we send 10,000 tons of radioactive garbage to Russia AND throw in $15 billion for Vladimir Putin. For the cash, Putin must solemnly promise to store the potential bomb-making material safely and not let any of it slip into the hands of the Iranians or the IRA.

Just when I thought the Bush Administration had adopted every crack-brained idea that could threaten Mother Earth, along comes another. This send-uranium-to-Russia scheme is the creation of something called the Non-Proliferation Trust (NPT Inc), a Washington group which ‘grew out of extensive dialog with ... the arms control community and the environmental community.'

If by ‘arms control community' you were thinking Greenpeace, you'd be a bit wide of the mark. The Chairman of NPT Inc is Admiral Daniel Murphy, once Deputy Director of the CIA and Bush Senior's chief of staff. The other seven listed board members and executives include the former CIA chief William Webster, two nuclear industry executives, one former Nixon administration insider, the general who commanded the US Marine Corp, one top Masonic official and, indeed, one certified greenie tree-hugger.

It may not be your typical save-the-world line up, but their idea is worth a hearing. Russia has a huge hot pile of ‘fissile material' - bomb fixings and old nuclear plant rods - sitting in polluted Siberian towns whose very names, like Chilyabinsk 14, sound radioactive. NPT Inc's idea is that if we send them more radioactive garbage, plus cash, Russia will then have the means and obligation to store theirs, and ours, safely.

This month, the scheme got a big boost when the Duma, pressured by Putin, abolished the Russian law which barred the nation's importing most foreign nuclear waste.

NPT Inc's assemblage of ex-spooks and militarists (and their lone green compatriot) control the operation through three non-profit trusts. But non-profit does not mean that no one gains.

This self-described charity will pay a British American deal-maker, Alex Copson, some unidentified percentage of the deal. NPT has been reluctant to give details of Copson's potential gain from the success of NPT - it took several calls and pointed questions - possibly because the polo-and-sports-car afficionado with the posh accent lacks the diplomatic gloss appropriate to this sensitive enterprise. Copson notoriously described the natives of the Marshall Islands as ‘fat, lazy, fucks' when they nixed one of his nuke dump schemes. Copson, I'm assured, is kept well away from NPT's Russian operations.

Contractors will share a few billion, including German power consortium, Gellschaft fir Nuklear-Behaltg mbH (GNB). Dr. Klaus Janberg of GNB is director of NPT International.

But the real winner, should NPT succeed, would be the moribund nuclear industry, which George Bush hopes to bring back from the crypt. But there is one huge obstacle: waste. If you think about it, the only indispensable appliance for a kitchen is a toilet; so too, one cannot build a nuclear plant without planning for the end product.

At $15 billion, dumping in Russia is a bargain. Since Russia is already a nuclear toilet, who would notice a little more hot crud?

Russia's own environmentalists have noticed, but objections from their Ecological Union are smothered by the ringing endorsement of the nuclear issues chief of one of America's richest environmental groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council. NRDC's Dr Thomas Cochrane sits on NPT Inc's MinAtom Trust board of directors painting the project with a heavy coat of green.

What on Mother Earth would drive the NRDC man to front for NPT? Bernardo Issel, director of the Washington-based Non-Profit Accountability Project sent The Observer a copy of NPT Inc's draft, ‘Long-term Fissile Materials Safeguards and Security Project.' At page 18, one finds arrangements for the NRDC to administer a $200 million Russian ‘environmental reclamation fund' for which the green group will receive a fee of up to 10% of expenditures, a cool $20 million.

NRDC's Cochrane insists his group would have never taken that role. An NPT spokesman says the clause has been removed from a new draft contract, though they have refused our request to see that document.

It would be wrong to assume that this is another case of greens selling out for greenbacks. The NRDC's Dr Cochrane is as straight a shooter as you'll ever meet. The problem here is not payola, but philosophy. The NRDC represents the new wave of environmental organization enchanted with the use of market mechanisms. The group is mesmerized by can-do entrepreneurs with access to huge mounds of capital, and sold on the pleasant if naive idea that the profit motive can be bent to the public good.

The NRDC and other pro-market environmentalists are always on the hunt for what their prophet, Amory Lovins, calls ‘win-win' cases - deals which aid the environment while making the big bucks for the corporate players. To the horror of many consumer advocates, NRDC stood with business lobbyists to push the trade in ‘pollution credits' and promote de-regulation of electricity in California, though the group did a quick flip on deregulation when the scheme flopped.

The NPT scheme is the quintessential public-private partnership that business greens find irresistible. For Dr Cochrane, the uranium dumping scheme's attraction is NPT Inc's promise, which cannot be easily dismissed, to provide billions to clean up Russia's radioactive hell-holes. And NPT also promises to toss in $250 million to a Russian Orphans Fund.

Environmental clean-up, non-proliferation and orphans. Why would Russia's green activists turn away from this obvious win-win? The answer, in a word, is "MinAtom."

MinAtom, Russia's ministry of atomic industries is, of course, the agency which created the nuclear mess in the first place. Can Minatom be trusted to safely handle both the nuclear fuel and faithfully use the several billion for environmental clean-up, not to mention the orphans?

USEC - What's a bit of bias, self-interesting and self dealing among friends?

As soon as I heard, ‘MinAtom,' I ran to my notes of the Observer's interview earlier this year with Dr Joseph Stiglitz, one-time chief of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors. During a tea break, the economist told me about an incident involving MinAtom which disturbs him to this day.

In July 1998, the Clinton Administration privatized the United States Enrichment Corporation, USEC. The privatized USEC proved inefficient at enriching uranium, but exceptionally efficient in enriching several Clinton associates. Hillary's sidekick Susan Thomases was a USEC lobbyist. The law firm that defended the President in one of Bill's bimbo law suits picked up $15 million for work leading up to USEC's flotation. A federal judge concluded that documents USEC tried to conceal suggest the privatization decision was influenced by, "bias, self-interest and self-dealing."

To sell privatization, Clinton's buddies at USEC promised their corporation would buy up tons of Russia's old warhead uranium.from MinAtom. As with NPT, the sales pitch was that private industry by taking over government enrichment operations, could reduce the amount of bomb ingredients in Russia's hands at no cost to the US treasury. Another public-private win-win.

But Stiglitz, ever the hard-nosed economist, he could not fathom how this new profit-making corporation pay the Russians above market price for the uranium.

The answer was, USEC couldn't. In 1996, some birdie dropped a damning document on Stiglitz' desk. It was a memo indicating that MinAtom had demanded USEC take about double the amount of uranium originally expected. Rather than take the costly deliveries, USEC quietly arranged a payment to MinAtom of $50 million. Stiglitz called it, "hush money." USEC says it was a legitimate pre-payment for the hot stuff. However one describes it, MinAtom was more than happy to play along, for a price.

Yet NPT Inc tells us that MinAtom and US private enterprise can now form a trustworthy partnership to safeguard nuclear material for the next few thousand years. At first, this puzzled me: NPT Inc's board is led by the CIA and military men who pushed Star Wars which they sold on the premise that Russia has probably let slip nuclear material to unnamed ‘rogue states.'

But I think I've solved this puzzling conundrum. What we have here is the ultimate, and very green, recylcing program: NPT ships America's uranium to the Russians, who lose track of a bit here and there ... which falls into the hands of a Rogue State ... which then returns it to the USA perched atop an intercontinental ballistic missile ... which is shot down by the trillion-dollar Star Wars defense system. Win-win for everyone.
©2001 Greg Palast

Leaving Conservationists Cold

George W. Bush's ideal citizen doesn't read a lot of books -- that's for the little woman, and she can worry about arsenic in drinking water, too. Civic spirit is the last thing Bush is looking for. It's too bad, because there's a lot of it around, just waiting to be summoned, as he would know if he got out of his bubble and noticed that young people are doing unprecedented amounts of community work and expect nothing in return but the satisfaction of having done something worthwhile.
© 2001 Mary McGrory

On The Latest Rigged Missile Defense Test

The Pentagon and the Bush administration are determined to sell the American people a national missile defense system that will probably increase tensions with allies and adversaries and will surely cost more than $100 billion. Their latest marketing exercise took place on the evening of July 14, when a "kill vehicle" launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific smashed into a rocket sent up from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Precisely according to plan, the target was instantly vaporized on impact -- and along with it, or so the Pentagon's uniformed salesmen hoped, the perennial concern that missile defense won't work. With the cooperation of major news organizations and conservative pundits, that test provided an enormous propaganda boost to the Bush proposal, which conveniently enough had been brought up to Capitol Hill by Defense Department officials just two days earlier.

There was only one thing that all the happy salesmen forgot to mention about their latest test drive. The rocket fired from Vandenberg was carrying a global positioning satellite beacon that guided the kill vehicle toward it. In other words, it would be fair to say that the $100 million test was rigged.

No wonder, then, that Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, the Air Force officer who oversees the NMD program, told the Washington Post on the eve of the test that he was "quietly confident" about the outcome. The general knew about the GPS beacon, while the reporters didn't. This rather significant aspect of the July 14 mission remained hidden in the fine print until a few days ago, when the Pentagon confirmed the role of the GPS device to a reporter for Defense Week magazine. But of course most Americans still don't know why the test functioned so smoothly, because the Defense Week scoop was either buried or ignored by the mainstream media, which had so obediently celebrated the technological breakthrough two weeks earlier. And as Kadish later acknowledged, each of the previous three tests -- two of which failed anyway -- had also involved the use of a guidance beacon. (To longtime observers of the missile-defense effort, this latest news recalled the notorious "Star Wars" scandal, when investigators discovered that a target had been secretly heated to ensure that it would be picked up by the interceptor's infrared sensor.)

Reuters was among the few news organizations that bothered to cover the Defense Week story. The wire service quoted a Pentagon official who "conceded that real warheads in an attack would not carry such helpful beacons." Probably not, although we can always hope that the Iranians or the North Koreans or the Chinese will attach to each incoming nuke a loudspeaker that screams "come and get me!"

Unfortunately, weapons experts agree that even the most primitive enemy missiles are more likely to carry a very different kind of accessory, namely, decoys designed to fool the computerized sensors aboard the kill vehicle.

While the missile launched from Vandenberg on July 14 did spit out a single Mylar balloon as a symbolic decoy, that scarcely challenged the kill vehicle's capacity to select the correct target -- particularly because there was no GPS beacon on that shiny balloon. In real warfare, an incoming missile is expected to deploy multiple decoys of varying shapes and sizes to lure the kill vehicle astray. Past tests have indicated that these simple fakes work far more reliably than the complex technology designed to detect them.

Eventually, the truth about the inherent problems of national missile defense may emerge in congressional hearings. But meanwhile, the Pentagon and the Bush White House mean to stifle any dissent about the capabilities of their favorite toy. They have repeatedly sought to reclassify documents that show that the system doesn't function as advertised. And within the past few weeks, they have blatantly attempted to intimidate Theodore Postol, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is the country's leading critic of missile defense.

In early July, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Defense Department officials asked MIT to confiscate the reclassified report from Postol and to "investigate [his] actions." At first MIT president Charles Vest, no doubt worried about millions of dollars in defense research grants to his university, moved to comply with that request. Only when Postol protested publicly did MIT back down.

Bogus tests and bullied critics are the hallmarks of a defense establishment that fears facts. With billions in contracts at stake and bellicose ideologues in power, the salesmen for national missile defense must conceal the many defects in their dangerous product. And the press corps, reverting to the bad habits of the Cold War, has done little so far to penetrate the Pentagon's propaganda.
©2001 Joe Conason

Quotable Quote

"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it."
Emperor Smirkus Maximus

Apetown, My Hometown
Maureen Dowd

LOS ANGELES - I needed a break from politics.

Just a short spell on the West Coast, soaking up some plastic culture and Botox glamour. No thoughts of Washington at all. No cravings for Rummy. No achings for Ashcroft.

It was so relaxing on the Pacific, I even decided to play hooky Friday and go to the first show of "Planet of the Apes." My column was due in a few hours, but the future was written in pink neon. Anything seemed possible.

I settled in with my popcorn as Mark Wahlberg's astronaut jumped in his Delta pod and shot into space, calling out "Never send a monkey to do a man's job." He is propelled through time and space and crash lands on the Planet of the Apes.

As Mark ran around the jungle chased by snarling simians, I began feeling anxious. Apetown seemed strangely, disturbingly familiar: evolution hurtling backward. Progress in reverse. An arrogant determination to trash the compacts governing humans.

"Do-gooders," one monkey sniffs. "Who needs 'em?"

When Tim Roth as the human-hating chimpanzee army general announced "Extremism in defense of apes is no vice," I suddenly got a creepy feeling that I had been there.

Was Apetown Washington? Was the Planet of the Apes the Bush White House? Hmmmm, so W. is President Primate.

This was not only a Tim Burton fantasy, it was America's scariest reality show.

W.'s second trip to Europe reinforced his hollow hubris. He gladhanded the European leaders even as he thumbed his nose at their treaties.

"I know what I believe," he said as he visited the Roman Forum, "and I believe what I believe is right."

Like the monkey planet, Washington looks more and more menacing and antediluvian, with the Bushies beating their chests and growling.

In 2000, America seemed to be moving along briskly into the future, cooperating with the rest of the world on international issues, trying to clean up the environment and keep the threat of nuclear war tamped down.

Then the retread Bush crowd swept in and flung us into the same sort of time warp that swallowed Mark Wahlberg.

The president is plunging ahead or behind with his technologically suspect Star Wars defense system, intending to vitiate the ABM treaty and putting China and Russia on edge and into a closer alliance.

He pressed forward or backward last week with his plan to kill Kyoto, turning America into the haughty sole holdout as 178 other nations agreed to implement the treaty to fight global warming —as usual, offering no alternative approach.

Playing to its favorite audience of big business and gun owners, the administration last week blew off a U.N. plan to enforce an international ban on biological weapons and recently pressured the U.N. to weaken a pact to stem the illegal flow of small arms, from handguns to shoulder-launched rockets.

The administration has no interest in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, banning all nuclear test explosions, and is expected to reject the treaty banning land mines.

W. and his Gerald Ford-era warlords —befogged in a cloud of nuclear waste, carbon dioxide, arsenic and coal dust —never meet an old idea they don't like.

Even some hidebound Republicans in Congress find the Bush White House too far down on the evolutionary scale. On Thursday, senators from both parties upbraided E.P.A. administrator Christie Whitman, and said that if the Bushies refused to act on climate change, they would take matters into their own hands and come up with their own plan. And on Friday, the House, with some Republicans going against the president, voted to prevent the Bush administration from easing rules on the levels of arsenic in drinking water.

There was even talk last week that the White House might pull out of a U.N. conference on racism.

During the campaign, W. wouldn't come out firmly in favor of teaching evolution over creationism. That should have been our clue that he's unwilling to evolve. He is so mired in the past, he almost seems antagonistic toward the future.

Without giving away the ending of the new version of the classic collision-of-species movie, I can tell you there's a chilling scene set in Washington. It shows what can happen when the guys in charge monkey around in the wrong direction.
©2001 Maureen Dowd

This weekend, when several hundred abstinence advocates gathered for a conference in Miami, they were greeted with an effusive letter from Bush. "Abstinence is not just about saying 'no,' " he wrote. "It's about saying yes to a happier, healthier future."
©2001 Ceci Connolly

Remember Negroponte
By William Rivers Pitt

"The principle office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity." – Tacitus

A wise friend recently offered the reminder that the best weapon anyone can bring to bear upon that which they oppose is a long memory.

I was fifteen years old in 1987, working behind the snack bar of a public golf course. A battered old television was propped up in the corner, and it was on all the time during the Iran-Contra hearings. I pulled sodas and served coffee and shot the breeze with the regulars, and I watched every damned minute of those hearings.

It is then, I think, that the first true stirrings of my current political ideology rose up and peered with furrowed eyebrows at Lt. Colonel Oliver North. I was young, and not able to understand fully the scope and magnitude of what was happening. Despite that, it was clear to me, and from what I could tell it was likewise clear to the nation, that something had gone fundamentally wrong in the White House.

And then, of course, the wheels came off. The hearings degenerated into long, lazy afternoons filled with softball questions tossed up to North and his lawyers. Hunter Thompson best described the scene in 'Generation of Swine':

"By the end of the Thursday session, North had been fed so many home run balls that he and his lawyer were laughing out loud and slapping each other on the back every time Nields asked a question - and then North would give another 20 minute speech about how much he loved his wife and his children and his uniform and, above all, his commander-in-chief, The President."

North was a hero, the hearings went seemingly nowhere, Reagan served out his term, and later on a number of the leading lights within the scandal were given Presidential pardons by George Herbert Walker Bush. I finished out the summer at the course and proceeded to grow up, a bit wiser for having watched it all unfold.

That boy has grown into a man who happens to have become a teacher of history. It is my job to recall with alacrity the details and individuals that have coursed through our national events. Simply put, I get paid to have that long memory. I remember Iran-Contra.

I remember the Walsh Report, and have read it many times. It can be found here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/

The Walsh Report describes the whole sordid deal rather succinctly in its Executive Summary, which reads in part below:

"The Iran/contra affair concerned two secret Reagan Administration policies whose operations were coordinated by National Security Council staff. The Iran operation involved efforts in 1985 and 1986 to obtain the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East through the sale of U.S. weapons to Iran, despite an embargo on such sales. The contra operations from 1984 through most of 1986 involved the secret governmental support of contra military and paramilitary activities in Nicaragua, despite congressional prohibition of this support.

"The Iran and contra operations were merged when funds generated from the sale of weapons to Iran were diverted to support the contra effort in Nicaragua. Although this 'diversion' may be the most dramatic aspect of Iran/contra, it is important to emphasize that both the Iran and contra operations, separately, violated United States policy and law. The ignorance of the 'diversion' asserted by President Reagan and his Cabinet officers on the National Security Council in no way absolves them of responsibility for the underlying Iran and contra operations."

So much good reading here for an historian! So much to remember. What the Walsh Report does not speak to, what it glosses over, are the wretched facts of our involvement in Central America during this time. This omission is pressing today, because the ghosts of Iran-Contra have come back to haunt us.

John Dimitri Negroponte stands today as the nominee to represent the United States at the U.N. Negroponte is currently the Executive Vice President for Global Markets at McGraw Hill Companies, Inc., and served for 37 years with the United States Department of State as a career diplomat.

One of his diplomatic postings was as the American Ambassador to Honduras. He served there from 1981 to 1985, at the height of the Iran-Contra actions taking place in Central America. If nominated, Negroponte will join Elliot Abrams in the governmental service. Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress for his role in covering up the operation for the President and Vice President.

Eyewitness accounts have allowed us, with the passage of time, to understand the horrors that occurred in Honduras because of the direct actions of the Reagan administration. Eyewitness accounts tell us what Negroponte and Abrams surely knew at the time.

One such eyewitness is Sister Laetitia Bordes, a nun who worked in Central America during the 1980s and the 1990s. She has written a book entitled 'Our Hearts Were Broken.' Sister Bordes describes Honduras and Ambassador Negroponte in words we all need to hear:

"My mind went back to May 1982 and I saw myself facing Negroponte in his office at the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa. I had gone to Honduras on a fact-finding delegation. We were looking for answers. Thirty-two women had fled the death squads of El Salvador after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 to take refuge in Honduras. One of them had been Romero's secretary.

"Some months after their arrival, these women were forcibly taken from their living quarters in Tegucigalpa, pushed into a van and disappeared. Our delegation was in Honduras to find out what had happened to these women. John Negroponte listened to us as we exposed the facts. There had been eyewitnesses to the capture and we were well read on the documentation that previous delegations had gathered.

"Negroponte denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He insisted that the US Embassy did not interfere in the affairs of the Honduran government and it would be to our advantage to discuss the matter with the latter.

"Facts, however, reveal quite the contrary. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million; the US launched a covert war against Nicaragua and mined its harbors, and the US trained Honduran military to support the Contras.

"John Negroponte worked closely with General Alvarez, Chief of the Armed Forces in Honduras, to enable the training of Honduran soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, and many types of human rights violations, including torture and kidnapping. Honduran and Salvadoran military were sent to the School of the Americas to receive training in counter-insurgency directed against people of their own country.

"The CIA created the infamous Honduran Intelligence Battalion 3-16 that was responsible for the murder of many Sandinistas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a graduate of the School of the Americas, was a founder and commander of Battalion 3-16. In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfields in Honduras and established a regional military training center for Central American forces, principally directed at improving fighting forces of the Salvadoran military.

"In 1994, the Honduran Human Rights Commission outlined the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents. It also specifically accused John Negroponte of a number of human rights violations. Yet, back in his office that day in 1982, John Negroponte assured us that he had no idea what had happened to the women we were looking for.

"I had to wait 13 years to find out. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun in 1996, Jack Binns, Negroponte's predecessor as US ambassador in Honduras, told how a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women we had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, before being placed in helicopters of the Salvadoran military. After take off from the airport in Tegucigalpa, the victims were thrown out of the helicopters. Four children had been captured with the women.

"They were turned over to the Salvadoran military and their whereabouts are unknown. Binns told the Baltimore Sun that the North American authorities were well aware of what had happened and that it was a grave violation of human rights. But it was seen as part of Ronald Reagan's counterinsurgency policy."

There are still many threads from Iran-Contra waving in the wind. To be sure, a vital area of interest is the sudden and irreversible incapacitation of CIA Head William Casey. Casey knew where the bodies were buried, and who knew what, and when. But Casey was delivered insensate to his Maker without ever having The Questions put to him under oath.

Someday, perhaps, we will know the whole ugly truth. We will finally understand what Reagan meant to America.

In the meantime, we must rise up as one voice and denounce in the strongest terms the nomination of John Negroponte to be our Ambassador to the United Nations. Such a man, with such a bloody history, can not be allowed to represent this nation before a body that stands for the protection of human rights.

Our reputation on the world stage is tarnished enough as it is. We rush pell-mell towards the status of full-fledged pariah. At the very least, the nomination of Negroponte would further sully our flag. At worst, the nomination of Negroponte would wipe away some of the darkest crimes ever committed by any American administration in all of our history.

It cannot happen. Call your Senators, your Congressional representatives. Call the head of the Democratic Party in your state.

Call them, and tell them: I remember John Negroponte
©2001 William Rivers Pitt

Howl 2000
by Joan S. Livingston

The first "Howl" was published in 1956 by poet Allen Ginsberg and became an overwhelming success as a social commentary on an entire cohort, known as the Beats, many of whom are named in it and their experiences chronicled (e.g., Carl Solomon, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac). It represents a kind of primal scream, as selected lines (including the first and final; emphasis added) from this very long poem suggest:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix... who passed through universities...among the scholars of war...[and] were expelled...for [writing] crazy...odes on the windows of the skull, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge... who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade... with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

For many who voted in November's presidential election, the outcome of the protest, contest, and cinematic multiplex of court cases created occasion for another communal primal howl - one that continues to echo, and seems to grow even stronger with each taunt to "Get over it" or the shrug, "Maybe it won't be so bad" (a hopeful notion disproven with each day's new headlines). As revelations continue to surface about the machinations of the Supreme Court and the "irregularities" in Florida, with its 25 decisive electoral votes, incredulity still mounts that an election should be so decided in the home of democracy, a country that has helped other countries run free, fair elections.

While the vote was close - with Al Gore clear winner of the popular vote (and according to later statistical sampling and analyses, almost certainly the Florida majority as well) - some groups unquestionably stood to fare far worse under a Republican administration, particularly this one, than others: the poor, people of color, women, gays, the "usual suspects" in terms of society's unprotected and dispossessed - the people described by both parties (one more cynically than the other) as those "left behind." Not to mention those who cared about little things like the environment and health care.

It's still hard for many of us to comprehend, given his ceaseless mangling of facts and numbers, his lysdexic speech, the abysmal Texas record, and his campaign centerpiece - returning wealth to the wealthy - how Bush gained almost half the vote. The pundits simply labeled him "more likable." Well, most of us usual suspects found Gore plenty likable.

In any event, whether one voted for Gore, Bush, or the late Pat Paulsen, there is one Inalienable Truth about election 2000. As a result of the Supreme Court's unprecedented stay of the efficient, deadline-minded Florida count - on a Saturday no less, reeking of real desperation - and its subsequent eleventh-hour refusal to allow the vote count to resume there, Bush passed into the history books, and what now increasingly seems the Fright House, as our nation's first President-Select instead of President-Elect. The means by which this result was attained should alarm - indeed, enrage - all of us.

If you were a Bush supporter, remember: The precedent has been set, however unlawfully. So next time, the "election" might just be decided despite your vote and tens of thousands of others by the once-Supreme, now Supremacist, Court as well. And that is not democracy.

HOWL 2000

I saw the best minds of my time drawn by degrees like plants to sunshine, finally fully facing one once considered a mannequin man, who'd stood stiffly behind the president at least a thousand times, for a thousand photo-ops, a Tussaud's figure in his backstage role, who'd been thought made of wood and a tree-hugger, too, just a place where smart sap ran (a putative Pinocchio, conservatives smeared), but who emerged from the shadows, flesh and blood, a man of ideas and ideals, during his drive to serve the U.S. as president after eight years as veep: who found his full true voice at his party's convention, "tree" limbs moving fluidly around the stage, speaking his own words from his own homegrown roots.

Yes, this was his "own man": Al Gore himself on stage. People slouching on couches, half-dozing before TVs, began to sit up and listen. Undecideds decided; lukewarm liberals warmed up, many growing red-hot. With his mastery of the finest detail and his big-picture view, Al could make the numbers dance as skillfully as angels on the tip of a pin, balancing programs as myriad as the military and Medicare. No "fuzz" in his math, or from his mouth. Gore was The Goods: Vietnam without dodge, working journalist in a job Daddy didn't buy, over 20 years in the House, the Senate, the White House. And, unlike Clinton, he was unimpeachable (segue here to: "The Kiss").

In the opposite corner of the ring lurked and smirked a bantamweight, born George W. Bush but known as Dubya and dubbed Dumbya by some for his idiosyncrasies of speech and mind, the painful twisting of neurons, his ignorance of politics both domestic and foreign. "W" had limited credentials, light as feathers, one job botch after another - but his connections: heavyweight. Said the name "Bush" was his best gift.

He claimed early that brother Jeb had "guaranteed" him Florida, a battle- ground with 25 victory-votes. We thought it was bluster, metaphor; we were clueless. Jeb and co-conspirator Katherine Harris, head of every aspect of the state's elections, labored hard to ensure DUI Dumbya his believed Bush Birthright.

Harris's job included verifying the accuracy and consistency of all state polls, yet - tsk, tsk - the rate of "undervotes" (hanging chads, tricorner, trimester, swinging) would prove more than twice as high, often obscenely higher, in poor (Democrat, minority, working-class) counties. These votes could be read by hand (state law) but not by the machines - as the machines' maker later testified in court; finding of fact. When he'd sold the machines, the manufacturer had explained to elections officials the necessity of hand counts in any close election; this one was hair's-breadth. Harris knew underpunches HAD to be counted. Jeb too. But "wouldn't be prudent. Not at this juncture."

Like few of her peers, Harris had also taken the initiative of vetting Florida's voter rolls (almost alone in the U.S. these listed both race and party) of "felons" (read "blacks"), actually paying a Republican firm to flense the rolls in carefully selected areas, purging the names of thousands of African- Americans and white Democrats, the majority of whom had never so much as received a parking ticket, or who once committed a trivial misdemeanor (not affecting voting rights), and yes, even a few real ex-cons - who'd done their time, done parole, whose citizenship rights had long been restored. But not on the lists Harris fed at the last minute to the counties.

Bush's own convention was triumphant street theater with its "inclusion illusion," a hallful of Stetsons, with confetti and balloons raining down so hard they masked the lack of gist, giddily creating the sensation of early V-Day. W didn't pen a word of his own 17-draft speech - his aides had long known better than to let him talk unscripted! - and his Teleprompted hollow bones were a stark contrast to Al's lone laptop self-composition of spirited meat.

The weeks before the election offered a seasick seesaw, a swash, of poll numbers: Gore up 4 today, Bush up 5 the next. Graphs whose line crossed, intersected, moving like waves - yet all within the margins of error. A wash. When Election Day dawned, voter protests were not far behind the sun's rising and the polls' opening - first in Palm Beach, where butterflies flew in the skies, overpunched for Gore, and fluttered - 19K! - into trashcans. Streets filled in Palm and wherever people of color and other registered voters were turned away from polls on creative pretexts in violation of state and U.S. law.

By Election Night, battlegrounds fell like dominos to Gore, but one state became a moving question mark (follow the bouncing ball - red? blue? still white?). At first the anchormen called Florida for Al; then for W; then the numbers began snaking - in one county a glitch quickly transmogrified a Gore lead into an impossible MINUS 16K votes - and the increasingly irritated newsmen finally called it "too close to call," where it remained for the next day's headlines, and the next's, and the next's.

A Satyricon of images followed - surreal people, surreal events - and hooked round-the-clock MSNBC junkies hungry for any news fix... In Palm, besides the 2-punch flutter-byebyes was the seeming emergence of a "Jews for Buchanan" movement (the Hitler fan, whose punchhole lined up directly with the Gore-Lieberman box, said himself those votes weren't his)...It took days to learn the inaccuracy of the machines in poorer districts, disproportionately affecting people of color. Though the undervotes required hand counts, some counties were advised that these were non-votes; thus, thousands of votes were simply tossed out, 27K in one black county alone...Still, Bush co-chair Harris - vampire blood-red lipstick on her Machiavellian maw - refused to recuse or to count, certifying a W victory with an alleged +500 surplus, a witch in hurried heat.

A convoy of Ryder trucks, as syrup-slow as O.J.'s Broncho chase, ordered to carry tens of thousands of ballots to a judge who then never looked at one, not even out of idle curiosity...Once-statesman James Baker III controlling the Ministry of Disinformation, distorting facts like a funhouse mirror, accusing Gore of prolonging Indecision 2000 by resorting to court instead of concession, when Bush was first to file, on "equal protection" grounds (along with disenfranchised voters, on "unequal rejection" grounds)...The paid mob, toting flurries of professionally (and speedily) printed "Sore Loserman" signs, breaking down the doors of the Miami-Dade courthouse counthouse, rabid as Nazi youth, baring emotions and teeth (and signs) only Bush-backing money could buy...and given bullhorns, peripatetic in their usefulness, from Miami to the Supreme Court steps, where one Republican with a horn could drown out the voices of 50 asking only that votes be counted, to the VP's mansion, where Tipper and the VoteWinner heard day and night, "Get out of Cheney's house!" (Uncle Duke's "compassionate fascism," per Garry Trudeau, or just fascism?)

At last the courts, from Martin to Tallahassee, with Bush lead lawyer Barry Richard looking the Angel of Death (a white toupee?), while David Boies, best and brightest in the nation, toiled endlessly pro bono for Al. Believing.

Finally, W got his stay and his day in court. When the Supremes sang, we saw under their dark robes not 7 sets of wingtips & 2 of low-heel pumps, but instead 5 pair of plank-thick elephant jackboots and 4 of lawful, nimbler, dissenting feet. The song the Supremes sang was not sweet. Five-four, it had no harmony; it had no beat. Elephants stomped: "We Rule (this time) That Votes Do Not Count; Knowing What the Votes Say, Oyez, We Rule: Do NOT Count Those Votes."

The date was 12/12/00. File it in your mind as infamous as December 7, as horrific as November 22. Remember The Maine? Remember THE Florida.

All the hearts and minds that had turned toward Gore like sunlight broke, snapped like dry twigs, after the dark dealings in the "sunshine" state.

The court's ruling marked a lethal precedent, an illegal president, and the culmination of an "election" in which one state's Macbeth-like executive branch, its legislative, branch (postmark: Austin), and the nation's judicial branch alike chose to substitute their own personal, partisan preferences for those of actual voters to pick the winner in the make-or-break state and thus the U.S.

Disbelief still runs like tears. See the uncounted ballots in our outstretched hands, chads hanging from our mouths like rotten teeth... and the absolute heart of the Founders' poem of democracy butchered out of our souls and America's, with damage deep enough to last a thousand years.
©2001 Joan S. Livingston

Dead Letter Office

Heil Bush,

Dear Propaganda Ansager Roberts,

Congratulations you have just been awarded the Vidkun Quisling Award for 2001. Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Antoni (light-fingers) Scalia.

Without your help shilling for us, spinning the truth, telling out right lies and ignoring the real news, holding onto power after our Coup D' Etat would have been impossible. With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Media Whores," you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account.

Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross 2nd class presented by our glorious Fuhrer Herr Bush at a gala celebration in der Wolf's Lair (formerly Rancho de Bimbo) on 9-03-2001. We salute you Frau Roberts! Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Deputy Fuhrer Cheney

Heil Bush

Someone Might Notice
By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas -- I'm afraid Karl Rove's timing is off: You can't pass a huge tax cut tilted heavily toward the rich and then announce Social Security is about to go belly-up. People make the connection.

If only he'd waited 'til next year -- the Washington press corps can't remember anything longer than six months. But Rove has cut it too fine this time -- people are just now getting their rebate checks and hearing that Social Security is a disaster area at the same time. Furthermore, the peppy idea of putting Social Security money into the stock market doesn't look all that good since the market has lost about $3 trillion in the current downtown. Pfffft! Hey, let's put our retirement money into that sucker and watch it shrink!

The Bush commission has the singular distinction of being comprised entirely of people who already agreed with George W. Bush that Social Security needs to be privatized. Let me count the ways this is a truly bad idea.

One (and this is the leading reason for proposing this daft notion in the first place), it will take a huge amount of money out of Social Security and put it into Wall Street brokerage firms. You know how brokers work: They make money when you buy, and they make money when you sell. A no-lose proposition for them. Literally billions in commissions await them, and that's the lobby that's pushing the privatization scheme.

Social Security happens to be run at a miniscule administrative cost (yes, government does do some things right). If we break off some of the money into private accounts, administrative costs and brokerage fees will eat more of our money. Second, you know perfectly well a lot of people will get ripped off if they control their own retirement money. Older people are particularly vulnerable to con artists --- it'll be a gold mine for gold mines, diamond finds and every other cockamamie, pie-in-the-sky scheme that's ever come along. Think only the feeble-minded will lose? Who lost money in high tech? Wasn't it all those brilliant young hotshots we kept hearing about? Wasn't it the NASDAQ that went down 60 percent?

Then there is the unhappy set of matching numbers to be considered. The Bush tax cut (35 percent to the richest 1 percent of the people) will eventually cost about $170 billion in annual revenues. The estimated SS shortfall by 2038 comes to $180 billion. Maybe if you invest your $300 rebate (setting aside the 28 percent of you who aren't getting any money and the other 12 percent who will get less than $300) in the stock market, you'll be able to retire in a few years. But don't count on it.

You will hear more lies, damn lies and statistics about the state of Social Security in the coming months and years than even Mark Twin could have dreamed of. The Social Security trustees, on whose numbers the Bush commission relied, are using an exceedingly grim forecast. Nevertheless, it makes more sense to use those forecasts than to use Rosy Scenario and assume there's nothing we need to do about it.

According to the experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and everybody else, we do have real, long-term problems with Social Security that need to be addressed now, but we are nowhere near a crisis -- and the crunch is further out than the Bush commission says. Republicans have traditionally accused Democrats of fear-mongering on Social Security. Unfortunately, the Republicans have now taken it up.

The most unfortunate thing about the commission report is not just that it's misleading, but that it further polarizes a debate that will have to be solved by both parties. The commission announces doom in 2016, because that's when the line of payroll tax receipts crosses SS outgo, but they are not counting interest from the enormous SS surplus, which should be by then $5 trillion. As Alan Blinder, former vice chair at the Federal Reserve, said cheerfully Wednesday, "That's not chopped liver."

Henry Aaron, author of an excellent book on Social Security and a senior fellow at Brookings Institute, says our situation is like that of a family saving for the college education of the kids. That education may well cost more than the family's current income, but the two things you do about it are to pay down the mortgage (the national debt) and increase your savings. So by the time the kids get to college, you're in financial shape to afford it.

Ken Apfel, former SS commissioner, says the good news politically is that Congress is now treating Social Security as a separate entity, rather than as part of the total federal budget. (Who said "lockbox"?) But the Bush tax cut is so large it may tempt Congress into using the Social Security surplus to finance government operations, and then we would be in the soup.
©2001 Molly Ivins

The Profit's Curse
By Tally Briggs

You remember this, right? At the Battle of Tippecanoe, according to legend, the great Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, one of the first chiefs to work toward uniting all the tribes in peace, was killed by General William H. Harrison's troops. So, Tecumseh's brother, The Prophet, brought General William Henry Harrison a message… a prophecy that history justifiably labeled, 'Tecumseh's Curse':

The curse went thus:

"Harrison will not win this year to be the Great Chief. But he may win next year. If he does...He will not finish his term. He will die in his office.'

'No president has ever died in office,' declared a visitor. 'But Harrison will die I tell you. And when he dies you will remember my brother Tecumseh's death. You think that I have lost my powers. I, who caused the sun to darken and Red Men to give up firewater. But I tell you Harrison will die. And after him, every Great Chief chosen every 20 years thereafter will die. And when each one dies, let everyone remember the death of our people.'"

So, what exactly happened to Harrison, and how did The Prophet’s Curse play out? Let’s see -

After Harrison was elected in 1840, he caught a cold on inauguration day and died of pneumonia one month later.
Lincoln - Elected in 1860, assasinated.
Garfield - Elected 1880, assasinated before his first year was out.
McKinley - Elected 1900 - assassinated also in the first year.
Harding - Elected 1920 - died of pneumonia.
FDR - Elected to first term in 1932, and to his third (when it was still legal) in 1940 - died in office, stroke (medical records missing).
JFK - Elected 1960 - assassinated.

Why haven't I heard anyone mention this lately? Did everyone think it ended with Reagan? Or is everyone paranoid that they'll get a visit from Weak & Stupid's SS boys like Pensacola seamstress Margaret Richard did when she sent her angry email to Florida legislator Rep. Allen Trovillion about his offensive anti-gay remarks.... and she cc'd Smirk and younger Brother Jeb!

YOU GO MARGARET!

Personally, I don't think it ended with Ronnie. And being of Native American decent, Cherokee and Choctaw, (ok, so my ancestors got busy on their way west from Scotland and Ireland), I tend to believe these things and take them very seriously - I suppose the Celtic blood doesn't hurt either.

Yeah I know, he dodged Hinckley’s bullet, and yes, he's still alive. Physically. But mentally? Now, please understand, I am not bashing an Alzheimer's victim. I have lived with it first hand. My father died from it last year. And as anyone who has ever been witness to it's devastation will tell you - they are not the same person they once were. They die mentally. It is literally the death of mental function, which finally leads to physical death. It is a horror. You cannot even say goodbye to them. The person who loved you and remembered you is already gone. (Daddy, I miss you, but I am very glad you aren’t here to see what they’re doing to the country you loved and fought to protect.)

Ronald Reagan did die in office – just not physically. Remember how it got to the point he wasn’t making any sense and they rarely let him speak in public?

So if the curse is still in full swing, and what on Earth has the United States government done to make the Native American people, and the spirit of the Prophet for that matter, want to lift it? The real question beyond "is Smirk actually alive?" Is this: Considering that Bush The Younger wasn’t elected, yet is our current Great Chief, who does the curse claim jurisdiction over? Al Gore, although elected by The People, was not "chosen to be Great Chief", that was done by The Hive of Five, who chose Twig. But is Twig really in charge? Is Cheney the clandestine Great Chief?

I suppose time will tell…. Unless a further requirement of the Great Chief is to be human, which the curse is not specific on, it only says "every Great Chief chosen", it doesn't even specify male or female. Either way, if humanity is a requirement, I suppose Weak & Stupid and Uncle Dick are safe.
©2001 Tally Briggs

The Cartoon Corner

This edition we're proud to showcase the cartoons of Dan Wasserman

America Is So Sick Blues

Sung to the tune of "Subterranean Homesick Blues"
With apologies to Bob Dylan

(instrumental intro)

Cheney's in his residence
Taking all his medicine
Bush and his henchmen
Tearing down our government
The economy caught
Down now, lay offs.
Greenspan says a bit rough
No debt will be paid off
Look out, kid
It's nothin' you did
Court gave win,
And they'll do it again
Bush has friends who steal votes every day
Payoffs for his rich friends
With Bush forget a spending cap
With the red pen
Wants billion dollar bills
But he can't fund them

Cheney comes heart broke
Ashcroft: racist nut
Powell cleans the mess up
Rice is a bad joke
Ari keeps press away
Rove scripts what Bush will say
They're plans dust by early May
Funeralgate any day
Look out, kid
Don't matter what they did
Step on Congress' toes
Jefford now shows
Better stay away from those
That shill for the cocaine nose
See some more lows
Watch your stocks close
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows

Get sick, get well
In HMO hell
High bills, hard to tell
If patients rights'll sell
Sick child, get barred
Set back, system failed
Get nailed, They bailed
Watch hospitals flail
Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
Bush users, cheaters
Big time losers
Pick apart the people
Make Bush the corporate tool
Supportin' their big fool
He's such a bad leader
Watch the ground'll greet us

Allies scorned, you warned
Missles, treaties, left to chance
New test, get blessed
Try to be a success
Missed once, missed twice, big ifs
Success, small lift
Twenty years of testing
And the interceptors makeshift
Look out kid
Keep results all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't trust scoundrels
Watch rigged testing scandals
Rumsfeld just a big bum
Just wants bigger guns
They'll never work
The science too hard to handle
New lyrics by Skisics Surus, skisics@yahoo.com

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing." ... Edmund Burke

SUPPORT THE OREGON DEMOCRATS' PROPOSAL TO IMPEACH THE FELONIOUS FIVE!

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1. Write your members of Congress and urge them to support the Democratic Party of Oregon's resolution.

2. Contact your local and/or state Democratic Party office urging them to also support the resolution.

3. Contribute to the Democratic Party of Oregon. We plan to continue to promote this resolution and your contribution, no matter how small, will help us in this fight for democracy. Click on Democratic Party of Oregon to send your support today!

Supreme Injustice
by STEVE COBBLE

Lest we forget--just over six months ago, the Rehnquist Court stole an election in broad daylight. In fear of the truth, the Scalia Five intervened to block all votes from being counted, an action "unprecedented" (both historically and judicially) in US history. Though the June 12 "anniversary" went unnoticed by the media, we must never forget.

Was it the worst Supreme Court decision in US history, as American University Constitutional scholar Jamin Raskin has suggested? Considering that Raskin is a staunch civil rights advocate, the very thought that he would rank Bush v. Gore lower than both the Dred Scott and Plessy rulings is instructive. Nor does Raskin stand alone in his opinion of this judicial coup.

Justice John Paul Stevens: "One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. I respectfully dissent."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "In sum, the Court's conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court's own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States. I dissent." And related is the unsigned per curiam decision of the Scalia 5, a transparent attempt to try to avoid history's scarlet letter.

Hendrik Hertzberg, former presidential speechwriter: "The election of 2000 was not stolen. It was expropriated."

David Kairys, Temple University: "We had a constitutional crisis, and it was Bush v. Gore. History will not be kind."

Suzanna Sherry, Vanderbilt University: "There is really very little way to reconcile this opinion other than that they wanted Bush to win."

Jeffrey Rosen, legal scholar: "They have...made it impossible for citizens of the United States to sustain any kind of faith in the rule of law as something larger than the self-interested political preferences of William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O'Connor."

Randall Kennedy, Harvard University: "But we should also insist that there be no confirmation for Scalia-like champions of the right-wing agenda. The Supreme Court has hurt its own reputation by wrongly intervening to ensure the victory of George W. Bush. Those who abhor what the Court did should say so and say so loudly and clearly."

Jesse Jackson and John Sweeney: "But if it comes down for justices to the 14th amendment and the promise of equal protection, one can only hope for the sake of the country that they consider how not counting all the votes mirrors too closely the habits of heart and mind that brought us slavery and segregation--the original sins of our nation that the equal protection clause sought to repair."

And, of course, Vincent Bugliosi, prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of several bestselling true-crime books, in The Betrayal of America: ". . . the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law.... [The Court searched] mightily for a way, any way at all, to aid their choice for president, Bush, in the suppression of the truth, finally settling, in their judicial coup d'État, on the untenable argument that there was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause..."

Recent polls indicate the public's growing dissatisfaction with the results of the Scalia Five's decision. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and Princeton Survey Research Associates (June 13-17) showed George W. Bush's job approval rating at just 50 percent, down six points from March; the New York Times survey with CBS News (June 14-18) put the rating at 53 percent, down seven points from March. And Democracy Corps's Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll (June 11-13) found that 48 percent of likely voters think the nation is currently on the "wrong track." Perhaps most tellingly, 25 percent of voters in the Democracy Corps poll said that the phrase "not really elected President" describes Bush "very well," with another 15 percent saying that it describes him "well"--in other words, six months after the Scalia Five coup, 40 percent of likely voters still believe Bush was not really elected President.

What then, is to be done?

The least we can do is know our own history, and to understand that what the Injustices did was an insult to the dreams and ideals of Lexington and Concord, Valley Forge and Jefferson and Paine, Gettsyburg and Lincoln and Douglass, Selma and King, Seneca Falls and Anthony, Delano and Chavez, Flint and Debs and Lewis. We can bear witness to injustice, in the nonviolent protest tradition of Thoreau, Gandhi, King, Havel, Robinson, Chavez.

The Scalia Five's judicial coup came down on the second Tuesday last December. So, on the second Tuesday of July, July 10, 2001, the Tuesday after the Pro-Democracy Convention in Philadelphia, the Tuesday between Independence Day and Bastille Day, the Institute for Policy Studies and friends are calling for a peaceful, nonviolent vigil at the Supreme Court building, at noon.

On July 10--and each Tuesday at noon from then on--let's gather at the scene of the crime, and bear witness to the truth. The Scalia Five won't be there; but we should be.

Bring a candle or a bell, like the Czechs a decade ago. Bring a copy of the Voters' Bill of Rights, or the US Constitution. Send an e-mail to all your friends, with your favorite quote from this list. Bring Pablo Neruda's and Marge Piercy's poems. Bring the next generation, so they will never forget. Bring your commitment to restore, rebuild, and expand American democracy. The Supreme Court cheated. Democracy lost. For now.
©2001 STEVE COBBLE

Send $100 or $1000 to The Heritage Foundation or Other Right-Wing Groups

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And if you still want to annoy the Heritage Foundation, you can always go to their online donation form as soon as you try to leave the page, a pop-up window appears asking why you decided not to donate. Give them an explanation, but remember to be polite!

TO OUR REPRESENTATIVES AND SENATORS IN THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS

We, the undersigned voters, know that our cherished democracy is endangered from within by the grave and potentially fatal flaws in our voting systems exposed by the Presidential Election of 2000.

As our elected representatives, you have the duty, the opportunity, and the privilege to correct these flaws and to restore fair and honest elections throughout our nation. To this end, we charge you to construct and pass a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS, which shall include:

Strict enforcement and extension of the Voting Rights Act to prevent the disenfranchisement of voters and require full investigation and criminal prosecution of any offenders;

Standardized, easily understandable federal election ballots

Funding to replace old and unreliable voting machines to ensure that every vote is counted fairly and accurately

Genuine campaign finance reform that bans campaign contributions from special interests

Replacement of the Electoral College with a majority-rule election, or substantial reform of the Electoral College to allow for proportional representation

Measures to increase voter participation by eliminating bureaucratic hurdles to voter registration and turnout, including language barriers, physical barriers, archaic equipment, and lack of resources

Enactment and enforcement of a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS will restore trust in our government and encourage participation in our democratic processes. The linchpin of a democracy is the process by which we select our representatives and leaders. The right to vote is our defining right as citizens of this nation. We call upon our elected representatives to protect our Constitution from abusive exercise of government power by enacting a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS.

We pledge our full and constant support for enactment of a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS.

A Note of Protest:

It is likely that 50% of the U.S. population is strongly dissatisfied with the ascendancy of George W. Bush to the office of President. There are three likely reasons:
1. Bush won the election under questionable circumstances;
2. Bush has espoused a reactionary platform that places him far to the right of mainstream America;
3. Bush has demonstrated none of the intellectual attributes expected of a president.

In the interest of democracy, one could discredit election gripes (point number one) as being unfair to our longstanding electoral college process.. Also, one might disregard Bush’s agenda (point number two) because the hallmark of the United States Constitution is tolerance for divergent political and moral beliefs.

However, point number three leads to a more egregious problem, namely that a rather anonymous man, with no distinguishing ambition or vision has, by virtue of family wealth and connection, been installed as President of the United States. Even the most cursory glance at George W. Bush’s history and character builds a strong case for charges of nepotism and cronyism. Such a glaring display of favoritism, to benefit an individual with no considerable talent, runs counter to the spirit of competition and fair play that has driven the engine of American capitalism for more than two hundred years.

There is a way to tangibly and immediately raise a voice in protest of George W. Bush as President. For the remainder of his term, conscientious Americans should simply write "George W. Bush is an Idiot" on all U.S. currency that passes through their hands.

This protest has already begun. The first bills were marked and spent in San Francisco as of January 26, 2001. What is important, though, is to not only begin marking all currency (and to continue the effort throughout the Bush presidency), but to forward this memo as much as possible so as to replicate the message throughout our money supply.

In an effort to mark money more industriously, many of us have ordered a BUSH IS A FRAUD rubber stamp; these self-inking rubber stamps are useful for marking the "Fraud" message in red ink.

Make your voice heard,
Steven Capozzola
San Francisco, California