The dream of peace by Carol Wolman

THE DREAM OF PEACE by Carol Wolman

 

Dear Friends,

 

People always and everywhere dream of peace.  Peace means a sense of security.  It means butter, not guns.  It means calmness so that disputes are settled rationally and fairly rather than by force.   Peace leads to prosperity, and leisure time to cultivate the arts and sciences.  The only people who benefit from war are the military and the munitions makers.

 

There are two kinds of peace.  One is the peace imposed by empire, such as the Pax Romana of the Roman empire.  Bush is seeking to impose a Pax Americana on the world, accompanied by an endless war against terror.  Since his family owns companies that profit from war, this gives him the best of both worlds.  

 

Bush's followers believe that Bush is a harbinger of the Second Coming, if not Jesus himself.  In their minds, Bush is spreading a Christian theocracy, which is to be God's kingdom on earth. 

 

In fact, the Biblical vision of peace is quite different.

 

He shall judge between the nations,
and impose terms on many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
one nation shall not raise the sword against another,
nor shall they train for war again.

Isaiah 2: 4

http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/112804.htm

This vision is the basis for the United Nations, and is inscribed on its walls.  The UN  is designed to be an international forum dedicated to keeping peace. 

 

One world government by force is a work of the antichrist.

 

In the name of the Prince of Peace,   Carol Wolman

Fw: [wvns] 9-11 Hero Sues Bush

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Ken Freeland

To: kenfree@ev1.net

Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2004 4:36 AM

Subject: FW: [wvns] 9-11 Hero Sues Bush

TC Rescue Hero Sues Bush and Others under RICO Statute
    By Philip J. Berg, Margaret Atheling Rowe


On September 11, 2001, William Rodriguez, a maintenance worker at the
World Trade Center in Manhattan, single-handedly rescued fifteen
people. The only employee with the master key to the North Tower
staircases, he led firefighters up the stairs, unlocking doors as he
went, aiding in the evacuation of hundreds of additional people who,
but for his efforts, might have perished. Although his job
description did not include saving lives, Rodriguez re-entered the
building three times after the first plane struck, and was the last
person to exit the North Tower alive.

    He survived the collapse of the North Tower by diving beneath a
fire truck to avoid the avalanche of concrete and steel. After onsite
treatment for his injuries, Rodriguez plunged right back into rescue
efforts at the site. At dawn the next morning, Rodriguez returned to
Ground Zero from his home in Jersey City, to continue to aid in
rescue efforts. Later, Rodriguez became an unofficial spokesman for
survivors, among other things helping to secure an amnesty for
undocumented aliens, many of them Latinos, and in the creation of the
World Trade Center Memorial Fund.

Although he lost his job of 19 years and his means of livelihood -
even falling into homelessness for a time - Rodriguez has continued
in the three years since 9-11 to continue his work in honor of the
heroes and the victims of that awful day, as president of the
Hispanic Victims Group, Director of the 9/11 United Services Group,
and member of the Family Advisory Council of the Lower Manhattan
Development Corporation. 

    Now, this native of Puerto Rico and remarkable American hero is
taking his 9-11 activism to an even higher level. He has commenced,
as Plaintiff, a federal court lawsuit against George W. Bush, Richard
B. Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld and others alleging that they and
others were complicit in the 9-11 attacks, and either planned the
attacks, or had foreknowledge of the attacks and permitted them to
succeed, in order to exploit a "New Pearl Harbor" to launch wars
against Afghanistan and Iraq. (The phrase "New Pearl Harbor" comes
from a declaration of principles by the neo-conservative "Project for
the New American Century," in which it is proposed as an event needed
to steel Ameri-can public opinion to support the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein, and U.S. military domination of the Middle East.)    

Attorney Berg acknowledges that Rodriguez's action will shock and
offend many Americans. But he urges critics to read the detailed
complaint, posted on the internet at www.911forthetruth.com, before
forming conclusions. "The 'Official Story' of what actually took
place on 9-11 is a lie," Berg flatly maintains. "We do not pretend to
have put together a full and definitive account of how, and by whom,
the attacks were carried out. But information reported in mainstream
media, and viewed in the light of common sense and the laws of
physics, demonstrate that the 'Official Story,' examined closely, is
not credible.

The 'Official Story' contains an alarming number of inconsistencies
and im-plausibilities. The major media have reported many of the raw
facts, but have studiously avoided analysis, because doing so would
reveal that the government is lying to us. The 9-11 Commission, a
suspect collection of government and intelligence insiders, restated
without question or examination all essential elements of
the 'Official Story' of the actual events of 9-11. It failed almost
completely to refute, or even to mention, the great body of evidence
that suggests the 'Official Story' cannot be true, and it failed
completely to hold anyone accountable. From the foregoing facts, it
ought to be obvious that a cover-up, or a "limited hang-out"
admitting only bureaucratic mistakes for which no one is to be held
accountable, has taken place and is continuing."    

    Berg maintains that many prominent figures in politics, the
military and the mass media consider the 'Official Story' of 9-11 to
be untrue. But while the truth is emerging bit by bit, thanks to
anonymous whistleblowers and researchers posting on the internet, to
date no one with the stake in being a Senator, a Presidential
candidate, or a media celebrity has found the courage to risk being
ridiculed as a "tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist." Berg points
out that the only Senator who has dared to publicly question even
parts of the 'Official Story," Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota, has
received threats ominous enough to impel him to shut down his
Washington, D.C. office until after the coming election.    

"Some facts cannot be denied," says Berg. "Clearly, 9-11 was carried
out by more than one person. Therefore, by definition there was a
conspiracy. What we're arguing is that the true conspirators have
abused their enormous power and the trust of the American people to
concoct and to sell to the world a false conspiracy theory, to
justify war and mass murder for economic and political gain. Since
the neo-cons, allied with the President, said in almost so many
words that they wished for a New Pearl Harbor, why dismiss out of
hand an allegation that they used their undeniably sufficient power
to actually bring it about?

    Why has there been no full and transparent investigation? Indeed,
isn't it shocking that the federal government grabbed up all of the
physical evidence, and that no police authority has conducted a true
criminal investigation into 3,000 homicides? Instead of due process
of law, government officials and the mass media convicted Osama bin
Laden, and had names and photos of his 19 accomplices on the
internet, literally within hours of the attacks. The truth is that
there is no definitive evidence that there were any Arabs on those
planes, and even less proof concerning the supposed identities of the
alleged hijackers."

Berg notes too that a poll taken by the respected Zogby organization
in August 2004 disclosed that half the population of New York,
including such unlikely "conspiracy theorists" as those who identify
themselves as "very conservative" and as Evangelical Christians,
believe the federal government had foreknowledge of the attacks, and
knowingly failed to prevent them. Asked why he decided to bring this
controversial lawsuit, Rodriguez explains that, having survived the
World Trade Center disaster when so many did not, he feels he must
learn the truth of what happened on that day. "If what the government
has told us about 9-11 is a lie," he says, "somebody has to take
action to reveal the truth.

Since that plane hit the North Tower on 9-11, like it or not my
life's meaning has become to reduce the number of victims, and the
amount of suffering from those attacks. If suing President Bush is
what I have to do to accomplish that, so be it." Rodriguez notes that
the events of 9-11 are directly related to the deaths of thousands of
people in two ongoing wars, attacks on Constitutional liberties in
the United States, the abuse and torture of detainees around the
world, and the use by the United States of depleted uranium and other
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.    

Admitting the obvious - that his client's legal fight against
powerful government figures is of the "David versus Goliath" variety -
Berg, a former deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania, invites both
financial support for his efforts, as well as assistance from
volunteer attorneys.    

The action, filed in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia on
10/22/04, is Rodriguez v. Bush, et al., Civil Action No. _04 CV 4952

yubanet.com

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How to Create a WIA -- Worthless Intelligence Agency by Chalmers Johnson

How to Create a WIA -- Worthless Intelligence Agency
Published November 24, 2004 by TomDispatch.com
How to Create a WIA -- Worthless Intelligence Agencyby Chalmers Johnson

Two weeks after George Bush's reelection, Porter J. Goss, the newly appointed  Director of Central Intelligence, wrote an internal memorandum to all employees of his agency telling them, "[Our job is to] support the
administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees, we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."[1]

 

Translated from bureaucrat-speak, this directive says, "You now
work for the Republican Party. The intelligence you produce must first and
foremost protect the President from being held accountable for the delusions he has concerning Iraq, Osama bin Laden, preventive war, torturing captives, democracy growing from the barrel of a gun, and the 'war on terror.'"

The term "intelligence" has always rested uneasily in the name of the Central Intelligence Agency. There is no question that the agency was created in 1947 on the orders of President Truman for the sole purpose of collecting, evaluating, and coordinating -- through espionage and from the public record -- information related to the national security of the United States. Truman was concerned to prevent another surprise attack on the U.S. like Pearl Harbor and to ensure that all information available to the government was compiled and presented to him in a timely and usable form.

 

The National Security Act of 1947 placed the CIA under the explicit direction of the National Security Council (NSC), the president's chief staff unit for making decisions about war and peace, and gave it five functions. Four of them concern the collection, coordination, and dissemination of intelligence. It is the fifth -- which allows the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct" -- that has turned the CIA into a personal, secret, unaccountable army any president can order into battle without first having to ask Congress to declare war, as the Constitution requires.

Clandestine operations, although nowhere mentioned in the CIA's enabling statutes, quickly became the Agency's main activity and as one of its most
impartial Congressional analysts, Loch K. Johnson, has put the matter, "The covert action shop had become a place for rapid promotion within the agency."[6] The Directorate of Operations (DO) soon absorbed two-thirds of the CIA's budget and personnel, while the Directorate of Intelligence limped along writing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) -- summaries of intelligence produced by all the various intelligence agencies, including those in the Department of Defense -- for the White House.

Meanwhile, CIA covert operations subverted domestic journalism, planted false information in foreign newspapers, and covertly fed large amounts of money to members of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy, to King Hussein of Jordan, and to clients in Greece, West Germany, Egypt, Sudan, Suriname, Mauritius, the Philippines, Iran, Ecuador, and Chile. Clandestine agents devoted themselves to such tasks as depressing the global prices of agricultural products in order to damage uncooperative Third World countries,
and sponsoring guerrilla wars or miscellaneous insurgencies in places as
diverse as the Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Hungary, Indonesia, China, Tibet,
Oman, Malaysia, Iraq, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, North Korea,
Bolivia, Thailand, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Greece, Turkey, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, to name only a few of those on the public record. All this was justified by the Cold War, and no one beyond a very small group inside the government knew anything about it. The Central Intelligence Act of 1949 modified the National Security Act of 1947 with a series of amendments that, in the words of that pioneer scholar of the CIA Harry Howe Ransom, "were introduced to permit [the CIA] a secrecy so absolute that accountability might be impossible."[7]

How to Misuse Intelligence..

.When it comes to ignoring accurate CIA intelligence, the preeminent example in the Bush administration was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's indifference to al-Qaeda and her failure to ensure that the president read and understood the explicit warnings of an imminent surprise attack that the agency delivered to her. As the Washington Post's Steve Coll has summarized the matter in his book Ghost Wars, "BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S. was the headline on the President's Daily Brief presented to Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on August 6 [2001]. The report included the possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The hijacking threat, mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities outlined. There was no specific information about when or where such an attack might occur."[14]

Slaying the Messenger

After the extent of its failure became known, and under extreme pressure from the public and families of the victims of 9/11, the Bush administration
reluctantly authorized the creation of a National Commission on Terrorist
Attacks upon the United States and permitted National Security Adviser Rice to testify before it in public. But the fix was in: The Commission was to concentrate on "intelligence failures," not on the failure of policymakers to
heed the intelligence, and on the need to "reform" the CIA but not to such an extent as to damage the president's ability to blame it for his mistakes.

On November 20, 2004, right-wing members of the House of Representatives scuttled the major recommendation of the 9/11 Commission -- namely, to provide the leader of the American intelligence community with greater authority to direct and coordinate the analyses of all 15 intelligence agencies. Reflecting the Pentagon's interests in maintaining control over 80% of the $40 billion annual intelligence budget, Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and an ally of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, withdrew his support.

.After the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration's decision to go to war
with Iraq, the focus shifted from ignoring unwanted intelligence to actively
creating false intelligence. The critical item was the NIE of October 1,
2002, entitled "Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction," which became known inside the CIA as the "whore of Babylon."[15] It explicitly endorsed Vice President Cheney's contention of August 26, 2002 -- "We know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons" -- and was signed by DCI George Tenet with "high confidence." "The intelligence process," writes CIA veteran Ray McGovern, "was not the only thing undermined. So was the Constitution. Various drafts of the NIE, reinforced with heavy doses of 'mushroom-cloud' rhetoric, were used to deceive congressmen and senators into ceding to the executive their prerogative to declare war -- the all-important prerogative that the framers of the Constitution took great care to reserve exclusively to our elected representatives in Congress."

In succeeding months numerous review commissions revealed that the October NIE was only one of numerous failures by the truth-tellers to do what the people of the United States pay them to do. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the 9/11 Commission, and the CIA's Iraq Survey Group under Charles Duelfer all reported that the CIA's so-called intelligence on Iraqi WMD was fictitious. Even more dangerously for the White House, these reports suggested that its so-called war on terrorism and its attack on Iraq rather than on the true perpetrators of 9/11 were based on false intelligence, much of it manufactured in the Pentagon.

.The new head of the CIA, Porter Goss, is now setting about knocking off all such messengers and their supporters still inside the CIA because the agency, despite its frequent co-option and misuse by presidents, still retains a vestigial role as a truth-teller. Goss had been ordered to make it appear that the agency misled the President (rather than the other way round, as actually happened). He is then supposed to shake up what he calls a "dysfunctional" organization. After George Tenet resigned as DCI in July 2004 and went on the lecture circuit at $35,000 a pop -- he had earned well  over a half-million dollars by November -- Bush appointed Goss to control further truth-telling at Langley and to head off efforts by Congress to create a powerful intelligence czar, as the 9/11 Commission has recommended.[17] The Senate confirmed Goss by a vote of 77 to 17 (six senators did not vote), strongly suggesting the increasing worthlessness of Senate oversight of the executive branch.

Goss represented the 14th district of Florida for some sixteen years in the
House of Representatives, but before that, between 1962 and 1971, he worked in the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO). He was stationed primarily in Latin America, and rumors persist that he left the agency under a cloud. In 1995, he was appointed to the House's Intelligence Oversight Committee and in 1997 became its chairman. There is no evidence that he did anything at all in this position, including investigating the intelligence lapses that preceded 9/11 or the failure of the CIA to have placed a single spy anywhere within Saddam Hussein's regime. Admiral Stansfield Turner, DCI under President Carter, has said that Goss was the worst appointment ever made to the position of director of the CIA.

How to Create a Worthless Intelligence Agency

.Nonetheless, the CIA still retains its statutory role of compiling and
transmitting to the president objective intelligence on matters it deems
relevant to the nation's security. The Agency may have become little more
than a speed-bump for an imperial president who also dominates the Congress and the courts, but it is still part of the checks and balances of power within the executive branch of our government that make the U.S. a democratic republic and protect us from an imperial usurpation of power. With the reelection of President Bush and the appointment of Porter Goss to bring the CIA under White House control, it becomes increasingly hard to see how the republic will survive.

Chalmers Johnson's latest books Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of
American Empire (Metropolitan, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan, 2004) are the first two
volumes in a trilogy on American imperial policies. The final volume is now
being written. Between 1967 and 1973 Johnson served as a consultant to the
CIA's Office of National Estimates.

© 2004 Chalmers Johnson

Published November 24, 2004 by http://TomDispatch.com
The above was an EXCERPT,
For the complete article and footnote links, see:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1124-10.htm

Fw: Rachel's #805: Living Within Limits

----- Original Message -----
From:
To: "Rachel News"
Sent: Saturday, November 27, 2004 1:16 AM
Subject: Rachel's #805: Living Within Limits


> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS #805
> http://www.rachel.org
> November 25, 2004
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> LIVING WITHIN LIMITS
>
> It came out of the blue, an attack on the precautionary principle by
> the New York Times. The Times ran its anonymous broadside in its
> Sunday Week-in-Review section November 21 under the sub-heading, "ECO-
> ECONOMICS UNMASKED."[1]
>
> The main point of the Times's attack is that the environmentalist
> perspective on the world has now become mainstream and has "corrupted
> the study of economics." The Times says this corruption takes two
> forms:
>
> (1) an obsession with the need for limits, and
>
> (2) the assumption that people need to be cautious about economic
> development because it could have harmful unintended consequences,
> which has led people to foolishly embrace the precautionary
> principle.[2]
>
> The Times was quoting from an article by one Daniel Ben-Ami, titled
> "The dismal quackery of eco-economics," which appeared in October on a
> British web site called "spiked" (http://www.spikedonline.com). The
> full Ben-Ami article is available at http://www.rachel.org/library/-
> getfile.cfm?ID=491.
>
> At first blush, Mr. Ben-Ami appears to be an extremely learned
> scholar, a master of both philosophy and economics, tossing off names
> like Condorcet, Diderot, Goethe, Hume, Kant, Thomas Paine, Voltaire,
> Rousseau and Adam Smith. Unfortunately, Mr. Ben-Ami's scholarship
> turns out to be just a lot of fancy dancing around a cloud of
> flatulence -- in reality, a pop-gun attack on the precautionary
> principle by a guy who must have slept through high-school physics.
>
> Mr. Ben-Ami argues at great length that there are no real limits on
> economic growth because (a) when we run out of one resource, like
> copper, we'll simply substitute another; and (b) the amount of energy
> available to us is enormous because of sunlight.
>
> What Mr. Ben-Ami overlooks is the second law of thermodynamics, which
> tells us that all transformations of energy and matter -- in other
> words, all economic activities -- produce an increase in entropy, more
> commonly known as waste, pollution, disorder, externalities, side
> effects, or unintended consequences.[3] Therefore, the second law
> tells us, the ultimate limit on economic growth is the unintended
> consequences that it creates in the form of waste and disorder -- not
> the shortage of materials or energy.[4] On a finite planet, there is
> only so much waste and disorder that can be tolerated before the place
> becomes intolerably degraded -- and that's the kind of limit that is
> peeking over the horizon in modern times.
>
> The second law tells us that these unintended effects are inevitable;
> they cannot be avoided. We can reduce the harms associated with modern
> technologies, but we cannot eliminate them. To avoid turning the
> planet into an uninhabitable dump, we must learn to live within
> limits.
>
> The second law tells us that everything we do leaves behind a mess,
> and the more we do, the bigger the mess becomes. Want more coal? Then
> someone is going to remove more mountain tops in West Virginia and
> dump them into the nearest creek. Want to burn more oil? Then someone
> is going to cut roads and move heavy equipment into unspoiled areas
> and eventually warm the whole planet, leading to more floods and
> hurricanes and malaria and yellow fever. Need more food? Then someone
> is going to cut down more forests, leading to more soil erosion, more
> nutrients misplaced and more "dead zones" in the oceans. We all sense
> intuitively that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and the
> second law tells us that we are right, and it tells us why.
>
> In truth, some of my environmentalist friends don't like to
> acknowledge it, but even solar energy requires us to rip up the earth
> and build more platforms and towers and cables and substations to
> capture and transform energy and transmit it to where it's wanted.
>
> Of course we have been remarkably inefficient in the past and with
> greater efficiency we could create less damage while getting the same
> benefits -- but eventually we hit irreducible limits on efficiency
> (limits defined by the second law) and, at that point, the only way to
> make less of a mess is to do less.
>
> Eventually economic growth (growth in the amount of "stuff" we move
> around) must slow and then stop. On a finite planet, there is no way
> around these limits. That's what the second law says, and no one has
> ever found a way around it. Even when Newtonian physics gave way to
> quantum physics around 1900, the second law maintained its status as a
> fundamental law of the universe. It is the ultimate limiting law of
> nature.[4]
>
> There was a time when we seemed to be able to evade the limits of
> nature. At least that's how it appeared. That was because the world
> was nearly empty (of humans and their artifacts). When damage occurred
> it seemed local and of no great consequence, and we just moved on to a
> new place. But now the world is full. This is new, and Mr. Ben-Ami and
> the editors at the New York Times haven't yet modernized their
> thinking. We live in a different world than the one our grandparents
> inhabited. Growth used to be necessary and good, but that's no longer
> always the case. New conditions require new thinking. This is what the
> precautionary principle is about -- innovative thinking to keep pace
> with a changing world.
>
> Mr. Ben-Ami does get one thing right -- many in the "Third World"
> remain poor and malnourished while we in the overdeveloped North are
> trying to find our belly buttons amongst the rolls of fat.[5]
>
> The simple fact is, we in the U.S. long ago produced more goods and
> services than any one society could possibly need to claim the "good
> life." In the U.S., there's already way more than enough to go around
> -- it's just that 1% of our U.S. population has appropriated 40% of
> everything and is reluctant to share.[6] And that 40% is relentlessly
> pumping out propaganda like Mr. Ben-Ami's brand of "scholarship,"
> pretending that more growth will somehow feed the Third World poor.
> No, it won't -- the way things are set up now, more growth will merely
> give the world's wealthiest 1% more opportunities to make themselves
> even wealthier, and the Third World poor will remain poor. Indeed, the
> way things are set up now, more growth won't even help the poor in the
> U.S.[7] It is not for lack of food that hunger still plagues this, the
> wealthiest society the world has ever known
> [http://www.centeronhunger.org/facts.html]. It is for lack of sharing.
> We throw out half the food we grow, instead of making an effort to
> share it with those who are hungry.[8]
>
> The Third World DOES need -- and deserves[9] -- economic growth, but
> we live on a planet that is already showing signs of serious stress
> from past growth, such as:
>
> ** global warming;[10]
>
> ** depleted ozone layer;[11]
>
> ** women's breast milk contaminated with hundreds of industrial
> poisons [don't get me wrong: breast-feeding is still the best way to
> nourish an infant];[12]
>
> ** drinking water laced with low levels of viagra, anti-depressents,
> chemotherapy toxicants and several hundred other "personal care
> products" designed to be biologically active;[13]
>
> ** children's cancers and other environment-related diseases
> increasing;[14]
>
> ** many species of birds, fish, amphibians and mammals already
> extinct, and thousands more soon to become so;[15]
>
> ** and these are just a few of the more obvious signs that we have
> exceeded the natural limits of the Earth. This list could be readily
> extended.
>
> Intentional, targeted economic growth IS the answer to poverty in the
> Third World but, on a planet that is already stressed by the side-
> effects of growth, the "developed" countries have to stop growing in
> order to make room for growth in the Third World. Economist Herman
> Daly spelled this out some years ago.[16]
>
> Regional economic growth can continue, but it must be limited to those
> places where it is needed. The U.S. doesn't need more growth -- we
> just need more sharing to give everyone an opportunity to obtain a
> modicum of life's blessings. A full employment policy, to give
> everyone a decent job who wants a job would be a good first step
> (accompanied of course by a family-sustaining minimum wage).
>
> In the U.S. there's already plenty to go around. Our capitalist
> economy has done well by us, but it's now obvious that it has grown so
> large that it is wrecking the planet -- because of the inevitable
> waste and disorder that accompanies economic activity. So we need to
> learn to discern limits and live within them, aiming not to grow but
> to maintain the productive capacity that 400 years of hard work and
> economic growth have given us.
>
> Hitting the limits to growth also means we need to learn to share
> because we can no longer rely on growth to expand everyone's piece of
> the pie. Now we must pay attention to divvying up the pie more
> carefully, more fairly. The natural limits of the Earth require it,
> plus it will be good for our souls. Wasn't it Jesus who said, "It is
> easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich
> man to enter into the kingdom of heaven"?
>
> To summarize: Based on his misinterpretation of the second law of
> thermodynamics, Mr. Ben-Ami says there are no real limits on human
> activity because we are such an ingenious species that we can always
> figure out some way to get around any limits that nature may impose.
> Economists may claim this is true, but physicists know it's not.
> That's what the second law is about -- there really ARE limits to
> growth, limits imposed by the unintended mess we make whenever we do
> anything useful. Physicists call the mess "entropy" -- and it takes
> the form of chemical wastes, heaps of mine spoils, polluted water,
> unhealthy air, eroded hillsides, and sick children. For any
> beneficial activity, the mess can be reduced, but it cannot be
> eliminated.
>
> For 400 years, the western ideology of "progress" has told us that any
> limits can be evaded if we are clever enough. But now we know that's
> false, and we have to learn to live in this new world, bounded by
> limits. Doing so will still demand that we be clever -- to get the
> benefits we need while doing the least harm.
>
> Every industry will need people to rethink and redesign almost
> everything they've been doing. Such innovation will create tons of
> good jobs. But the world of limits will also require us to be not only
> clever but also wise, asking, Which activities are truly beneficial,
> and which are not? And: Which benefits can we do without? In the new
> world of limits, we will always ask, of every activity, is this
> necessary? And: Is this the best we can do? This leads naturally to a
> discussion of alternatives, which is the heart of a precautionary
> approach.[17]
>
> Mr. Ben-Ami represents the old, defunct way of looking at the world:
> do whatever might make a profit, then phoney up a risk assessment to
> prove that it's safe. We now know that this old "risk assessment"
> approach produced enormous harm -- to our health, to the ecosystems
> that our economy depends upon, and to our democracy. (How can we claim
> to have a democracy when 1% of the people own 40% of everything? Does
> money not translate into political power? Who are we kidding?)
>
> Mr. Ben-Ami represents a point of view that has been relegated to the
> heap of outmoded ideas, alongside the flat earth theory and the use of
> leeches to cure disease.
>
> There is a broader shift happening in our culture, from short-term
> gain to long-term sustainability -- or ultimately from a value system
> based on money to one based on life.
>
> The precautionary principle is a powerful new anchor for a traditional
> value system based on compassion, cherishing community, environmental
> stewardship and nurturing future generations within a framework of
> wisdom and forward thinking. Precaution is the future -- positive,
> powerful, healthy, and good.
> --Peter Montague
>
> ===================
>
> [1] http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=495
>
> [2] For a brief discussion of the precautionary principle, see
> http://www.rachel.org/bulletin/index.cfm?issue_ID=532
>
> [3] Mr. Ben-Ami actually does discuss the second law, for the purpose
> of dismissing its role in placing limits on economic growth. He says,
> "One popular [environmentalist] approach was to argue that economic
> growth is limited by the amount of energy in the world. The idea was
> developed by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, an American economist of
> Romanian origin, in the 1970s and has more recently been taken up by
> the likes of Elmar Altvater, Herman Daly and Jeremy Rifkin. This idea
> was expressed in scientific terms as a consequence of the second law
> of thermodynamics, which states that the useful forms of energy in any
> closed system decline over time. An alternative way of expressing the
> same idea is that the entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases
> over time. But as previous articles on spiked have argued,
> environmentalists grossly underestimate the amount of energy available
> on earth. In any case, the earth is not a closed system -- it receives
> an enormous amount of energy from the sun every day. So the idea that
> the availability of energy limits economic activity has no basis in
> science."
>
> This passage reveals a fundamental misinterpretation of the second
> law's role in limiting economic growth. Mr. Ben-Ami says that
> environmentalists claim that "economic growth is limited by the amount
> of energy in the world... [because] the useful forms of energy in any
> closed system decline over time [which can also be expressed as] the
> entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases over time." Having set
> up this straw man, Mr. Ben-Ami then knocks it over by pointing out
> that the Earth isn't a closed system because sunlight is constantly
> streaming in (perhaps Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly had
> somehow not noticed the sun?), as if to imply that the second law
> therefore doesn't pertain on Earth. It is impossible to know whether
> this misinterpretation of the second law results from disingenuous
> intentions or from ignorance. In any case, this misinterpretation of
> the second law is put into service as part of a larger argument that
> there are no physical limits to economic growth, which adds up to a
> colossal misconstruction of the importance and meaning of the second
> law.
>
> [4] See, for example, Jack Hokikian, The Science of Disorder;
> Understanding the Complexity, Uncertainty, and Pollution in Our World
> (Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Feliz Publishing, 2002); ISBN 0-9708953-2-1.
>
> [5] See, for example, Jim Jong Kim and others, Dying for Growth;
> Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor (Monroe, Maine: Common
> Courage Press, 1999); ISBN 1-56751-160-0.
>
> [6] Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, Economic Apartheid in America
> (New York: New Press, 2000); revised and corrected data available at
> http://www.ufenet.org/research/Economic_Apartheid_Data.html#p55
>
> [7] See for example, William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged
> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); ISBN 0-226-90131-9. And
> see Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, Economic Apartheid in America
> (New York: The New Press, 2000); ISBN 1-56584-594-3. See also Michael
> Zweig, The Working Class Majority; America's Best Kept Secret (Ithaca,
> N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); ISBN 0-8014-3637-0. And see G.
> William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Mountain View, Calif: Mayfield
> Publishing, 1998); ISBN 1-55934-973-5.
>
> [8] Environment News Service, "Half the American Harvest Goes to
> Waste," November 24, 2004. Available at
> http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=497
>
> [9] The Third World deserves our help because conditions there were
> intentionally created by Europeans as they "developed" themselves
> while subjugating the Third World. For an overview, see "Chapter 10.
> Creating the Third World" in Clive Ponting, A Green History of the
> World (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); ISBN 0140176608. And see Walter
> Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard
> University Press, 1981); ISBN 0-88258-096-5.
>
> [10] http://www.greenfacts.org/studies/climate_change/
>
> [11] Athens News Agency, "Ozone Layer Will Remain Vulnerable in Coming
> Decades," June 17, 2004. http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=
> 496.
>
> [12] See for example, Thaddeus Herrick, "Toxins in Breast Milk:
> Studies Explore Impact Of Chemicals on Our Bodies," Wall Street
> Journal January 20, 2004.
> http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=498.
>
> [13] See, for example, "Drugs in the water," Rachel's Environment &
> health News #614 (Sept. 3, 1998); available at
> http://www.rachel.org/bulletin/index.cfm?issue_ID=501 . And see
> Christian G. Daughton and Thomas A. Ternes, "Pharmaceuticals and
> Personal Care Products in the Environment: Agents of Subtle Change,"
> Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 107 Supplement 6 (December
> 1999), pgs. 907-938, available at http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/-
> 1999/suppl-6/907-938daughton/daughton-full.html
>
> [14] See, for example, "Tracey J. Woodruff and others, "Trends in
> Environmentally Related Childhood Diseases," Pediatrics Vol. 113, No.
> 4 (April 2004), pgs. 1133-1140. http://www.rachel.org/library/-
> getfile.cfm?ID=451
>
> [15] Agence France Presse, "Nearly 16,000 Species Threatened with
> Extinction: Report," Nov. 17, 2004. http://www.rachel.org/library/-
> getfile.cfm?ID=499
>
> [16] Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth (Boston: beacon Press, 1996); ISBN
> 0-8070-4708-2. For a summary of Daly's arguments, see
> http://www.rachel.org/bulletin/index.cfm?issue_ID=1186 .
>
> [17] Mary O'Brien, Making Better Environmental Decisions; An
> Alternative to Risk Assessment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000);
> ISBN 0-262-15051-4.
>
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Fw: Election Fraud 20040- great summary

Thank you, Mary Pjerrou.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mary Pjerrou (by way of Tom Wodetzki)"
To: "Alliance for Democracy"
Sent: Saturday, November 27, 2004 12:06 AM
Subject: Election Fraud 2004



ACTION MEMO: Election Fraud 2004 - American democracy's final hour?
From Mary Pjerrou, Elk, California, pirohuck@mcn.org, Nov 24, 04

The evidence of fraud in the 2004 presidential
election is so overwhelming that it is difficult
to know where to start. The evidence encompasses
many states and involves several kinds of voting
fraud and vote suppression. Suspect #1 are the
central electronic tabulating machines that
supposedly count all our votes. Shockingly,
these machines run on source code that is held as
secret, proprietary information (no public
review) by companies whose executives were
committed to Bush's election (including Walden
O'Dell of Diebold who promised in writing to
"deliver" Ohio to Bush in 2004, and Howard F.
Ahmanson of ES&S, known for backing rightwing
religious causes.). To make matters worse, a
third of the country voted on electronic machines
that provide no paper receipt for the vote,
making recounts impossible and auditing
difficult--all in all, a voting system made to
order for fraud.

The evidence so far all points to a Kerry win,
possibly by a landslide, that was changed to a
Bush win, with the main part of the fraud
occurring in the central vote tabulators in at
least a dozen states (probably all over),
combined with significant, blatant suppression of
Democratic and minority voters by highly
prejudiced Republican election officials,
especially in Ohio and Florida. This memo will
summarize the current situation and available
evidence, and the riveting and heroic
investigations, re-counts and lawsuits that are
in progress. It will also provide a working
hypothesis on the overall election fraud plan
(always helpful), and info. on what you and I can
do to help. Election reform is a must-do, and
it's really quite simple. To regain our right to
vote, we need: a) a paper trail; and b) open
source code.

THE CURRENT SITUATION:

John Kerry's concession has no legal force. He
can un-concede (as Al Gore did in '00). There is
reason to believe that his concession was a
strategic move to avoid the chaos of '00, and
quietly gather evidence. But whatever he decides
to do, this Election is not over, and its outcome
is not really up to him. As Kerry himself
recently stated, "They're still counting votesS"

First the states must complete and certify their
counts, and re-counts must be completed (all
on-going). The Electoral College meets and votes
Dec. 15. Congress then certifies the Election on
Jan. 6. (And there could well be fireworks at
that event, considering how angry black Democrats
are after '00, and after what was done to black
voters again this year.)

Many challenges, re-counts, investigations, and
lawsuits are in progress. Fourteen
Congresspeople have requested a GAO
investigation, led by high-ranking members like
Congr. John Conyers--and the GAO just agreed! (on
11/23). The Green Party and Ralph Nader are big
heroes, having successfully raised hundreds of
thousands of dollars in one week to obtain
recounts in Ohio and New Hampshire. The
Democratic Party has filed a lawsuit on the
"provisional" ballot count in Ohio. There are
investigations and lawsuits in FLA (don't know
about a recount there). There is a big citizen
and attorney effort to gather evidence
(particularly to secure the "black boxes" that
contain the secret source code, and their
printouts). Bev Harris, of
www.blackboxvoting.org--another hero--did a
Freedom of Information Act request to every state
in the country for "black box voting"
evidence--the biggest FOIA request ever.
Recently, she got a lockdown on evidence in
Volusia County, FLA. Her group has launched
fraud investigations in FLA, GA, NM, AZ and OH.

One very remarkable man, John B. Kenney, has been
on a hunger strike since Sept. 7, 2004, and will
continue until our right to vote is secured.
(www.hungerfordemocracy.com)

EVIDENCE OF MASSIVE ELECTION FRAUD

* Despite their secret source code, electronic
voting machines are easily hackable and extremely
insecure (well established by Johns Hopkins,
CalTech/MIT, blackboxvoting.org and many other
studies). In addition, the Republican-owned
companies who make them, and Republican
politicians (Tom Delay, and the Secretaries of
State in OH and FLA) insisted that no paper trail
was needed and strongly fought against any such
vote verification. A paper trail consists of a
paper receipt on which each vote is recorded and
locked away for recounts and audits. A third of
the country voted with no paper trail--that is,
without the ability to re-count the vote.
(Venezuela has a paper trail, and open source
code. Our election system is a disgrace by
comparison.) However, expert statisticians and
smart techies can use other methods to track
fraud. (Note: Statistical methods are admissible
in court in a "no paper trail" situation.)

* Several topnotch statistical studies point a red flag at '04 election
fraud:

The Freeman study:

On Election Day '04, the Exit Polls (face to face
questioning of voters, just after they voted)
showed a big Kerry win--including a Kerry sweep
of all the battleground states--until about 6
p.m. Dr. Steven J. Freeman (an MIT-PhD,
professor at the U. of Penn.) discovered that,
late in the afternoon, CNN began mixing the Exit
Poll data with the incoming data from the central
electronic voters tabulators which showed a turn
to Bush late in the day (odd, because that's when
the working poor and minorities vote). By luck
and fast thinking, Freeman was able to get hold
of the pure Exit Poll data before it was
corrupted by the election "results." The Exit
Poll variance from the election "results" is
extraordinary, and always favors Bush. Freeman
says that this is virtually impossible. He
establishes the reliability of non-partisan Exit
Polls, which are used worldwide to verify
elections. The odds against Kerry's predicted
Exit Poll vote being wrong in all 3 big
battleground states (OH, FLA, PA) are 662,000 to
one. He concludes: "As much as we can say in
social science that something is impossible, it
is impossible that the discrepancies between
predicted and actual vote counts in the three
critical battleground statesScould have been due
to chance or random error." This shift to Bush
(in electronic tally vs. Exit Poll predictions)
occurred in 10 of the 11 states studied. In 4 of
the 11 states (OH, IA, NE and NM), the Kerry win
was changed to a Bush win--with enough Electoral
Votes in the balance to turn the Electoral Vote
to Bush.

[Note: Jonathan Simon (www.scoop.co.nz) also did
critically important early work on the exit poll
issue, analysing 47 states, and showing that the
exit poll variance from the official "results"
was dramatically larger in the battleground
states Bush needed to win--a statistical
impossibility.]

The UC Berkeley study:

An impressive statistical team at UC Berkeley
headed by Professor Michael Hout reports that
irregularities associated with electronic voting
machines may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or
more "excess" votes to Bush in Florida. The study
shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes
for Bush in counties where electronic voting
machines were used versus counties using
traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this
large or larger rarely arise by chance -- the
probability is less than 0.1 percent. The
counties studied included big Democratic areas
(Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach). Hout, a
member of the National Academy of Science, called
for an investigation. (This study was recently
endorsed by MIT scientists who also called for an
investigation.)

* The 4 states in the Freeman study whose result
changed from Kerry (exit poll) to Bush
(electronic vote tabulation) don't begin to
exhaust the number of states where serious voting
anomalies are turning up (in addition to FLA,
there are inexplicable numbers in North Carolina,
Ohio, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Iowa, New Mexico,
Indiana--at least). Also, if phantom votes or
flipped votes in large numbers occurred as a
pattern nationwide--as the Berkeley study showed
in FLA--the popular vote (Bush by about 3.5
million) could also be wrong enough to overturn
the election.

* Examples: Another statistician has found an
improbable 15% margin for Bush in North
Carolina--amidst large, inexplicable
discrepancies between the absentee ballot vote
(30% of the vote) and the electronic vote, and
between the vote for President and lower offices.
Another: 29 Dem counties in FLA, one with 88% Dem
registration, producing landslides for Bush.
Another: more votes than voters (Ohio, 93,000;
Nebraska, 10,000). And there is much more. (In
one Ohio precinct, 600 voters, 4,000 votes for
Bush.) Evidence all over of inexplicable
numbers. What the statisticians are
doing--critically important--is sorting out the
probabilities of widespread innocent error always
favoring Bush (not possible.)

MASSIVE VOTE SUPPRESSION BY REPUBLICAN ELECTION OFFICIALS

Over 30,000 complaints of vote suppression and
difficulties in voting were lodged with the
Election Incident Reporting Service (EIRS);
57,000 complaints were sent to Congress; and "265
specific complaints" were listed at the
VotersUnite.org web site. There have already
been big hearings in Ohio, and the testimony is
heart-breaking and infuriating.

Most egregious, the Republican efforts to prevent
black votes, including black precincts being
shorted on precinct places or number of voting
machines--resulting in a 30 mile drive to vote,
or 10 hour voting lines, and black voters
arriving at the precinct they'd voted in all
their lives, to be told it's the wrong precinct,
then given wrong or no information on where to
vote, and many other kinds of harassment and
unlawful behavior.

In addition, touchstone voting screens that
changed a Kerry vote to a Bush vote--all day
long, without corrective measures. 60,000
absentee ballots "lost in the mail" just before
election day. Numerous duly registered Democrats,
minorities and students unfairly challenged at
the voting place, sending their votes into
"provisional" ballot limbo. New rules invented
by Republican Secretaries of State--you have to
register on 80 lb. paper; you have to have
written your birthdate on your "provisional"
ballot; you can't vote anywhere in the county
anymore, only at your newly assigned precinct
(the location of which we may or may not give
you). Electronic machines with a pre-set limit on
the number votes, that started counting
backwards, and deducting votes when the limit was
reached (thousands of votes lost). Republican
operatives in Nevada and Oregon pretending to be
a non-partisan voter registration group, then
throwing Democratic voter registration forms
away. Machines that reached pre-set vote limits,
and then started counting backwards, deleting
thousands of votes. And on and on and on.

As I said, the evidence of election fraud is
overwhelming. And virtually all of the weird,
inexplicable and impossible numbers from
electronic voting favored Bush and hurt Kerry.
And virtually all vote suppression was against
Democrats, minorities and students.

To sort all this out, a working hypothesis on the
overall picture of 2004 election fraud is
helpful. Here's mine--most of which occurred to
me around midnight on Nov. 2. The context:
Kerry was winning, according to pre-election
opinion poll analysis and election day exit polls
(after a huge, unprecedented "get out the vote"
campaign featuring Bruce Springsteen and Michael
Moore, and many thousands of volunteers). So, if
you had control of all the vote tabulation
machines, and no paper trail (and no conscience),
and you wanted to manufacture a Bush win, you
would:

1) Tweak several of the "red" states that were
threatening to turn "blue" at the time of the
election, toward Bush, to keep Bush competitive
in the Electoral Vote.

2) Grab %'s here and there, all over the map,
wherever detection had been minimized (f.i., no
paper trail), to manufacture a popular majority
for Bush--not huge, just enough--even in big
Kerry states where "excess" Bush votes might not
be noticed (or in big Kerry counties--as the
Berkeley study showed!);

3) Make it all come down to Ohio (or FLA), where
a lot of prep was done in vote suppression, to
keep it close, and where it now SEEMS to all turn
on a relatively few "provisional" ballots in OH,
with a highly partisan Republican Secretary of
State to judge their validity--whereas the main
fraud actually occurred way back upstream, and

4) (Unknown to me, or any observer, on Election
Night) Get your friends at CNN and Fox News to
start mixing your electronic vote data into the
Exit Poll data, to hide the big Kerry numbers in
the Exit Poll data, and make it appear that Bush
was winning late in the day.

All the evidence so far has confirmed this working hypothesis.

HOW HACKABLE IS THE ELECTION SYSTEM?

People think of CIA "black ops" and a vast
conspiracy. To hack a Diebold voting machine is
as easy as pie (one hacker, a couple of minutes).
As demonstrated for Keith Olberman on Countdown
(MSNBC), by Chuck Herrin at chuckherrin.com (a
computer expert, hacker and remorseful
Republican), as Johns Hopkins concluded, and as
repeatedly demonstrated and described by Bev
Harris, these machines are extremely insecure.
(The source code runs on Windows--a good laugh
for techies. Notoriously unreliable, hackable,
buggy, crash-prone, inferior software.)

A hair-raising Johns Hopkins study of our
electronic voting system, prior to the election,
rips into the Diebold electronic voting system,
exposing the vulnerability of "smartcards" which
are needed for each vote (easily duplicated by a
15 year old in a garage), the highly insecure
language of the code (C++), and the ease with
which anyone--a poll worker, a janitor--could
access and alter voting results leaving no trace.

Means. Motive. Opportunity. You begin to get
the picture. (Why would these Bush supporters
and pro-Bush voting machine companies insist on
no paper trail?)

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
LEADERSHIP? HOW COULD THEY LET THIS HAPPEN?

I'm not sure. A Republican-owned, extremely
fraud-prone voting system that will vote
Democrats out of office forevermore? Go figure.
You'd think they would've burned down the Capitol
to get this changed.

Here's my gut feeling: Some porkbarrel
(funneling federal election funds to the states).
Some corruption (Diebold spent zillions wining
and dining election officials.) But mostly, a
catastrophic failure of leadership. When you
look at the numerous of articles and reports on
the dangers of e-voting over the last several
years, you can't imagine that the Democrats
didn't know. And I guess they were just too busy
to give a damn about our right to vote, the
future of the Republic, and their own ability to
actually get elected (have us vote for them, get
our votes counted). It's very strange.

The Democratic Party leadership owes an
apology--to all those voters who stood in lines
for 12 hours to vote for them, and to all of us
fabulous grass roots democracy workers who gave
them a smashing victory, if the truth were known.
And the Democrats CAN redeem themselves if they
would just step up to the plate and help us NOW
to challenge this election! If they don't,
forget them! Let's form a new party!

WHAT YOU AND I CAN DO

* Write letters/emails and call Congressional
reps, state election officials, and the
mainstream news media, and rake them over the
coals (or praise them, if they're doing their
jobs to your satisfaction). (Praise is
impoortant, where warranted.)

* Groups that need our immediate financial support (and volunteers):

Bev Harris: www.blackboxvoting.org (or donations
to: Black Box Voting, PO Box 25552, Seattle, WA
98165)

The Green Party and the Cobb campaign (donations,
volunteers): http://www.votecobb.org

John B. Kenney (hunger strike-donations): http://hungerfordemocracy.com

Alliance for Democracy (action resource!):
http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org


MORE INFORMATION [It's all over the web--here's for starters:]

[on-going investigation, info on e-voting:] http://www.blackboxvoting.org

[many articles:] http://www.votersunite.org/news.asp

[Diebold hacking demonstration:] http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote.htm

[an amazing list of Election Fraud '04 articles:]
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002328.html#2328

[excellent archive:] http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995

[a really good explanation of the '04 exit poll
thing--very dramatic:]
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm

[detailed info, analysis, discussion of
everything - takes patience - see 2004 Election
forum:] http://www.democraticunderground.com

[The Freeman report:]
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/The_unexplained_exit_poll_discre
pancy_v00k.pdf
[Freeman report update:] http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/ale04090.html

[The Jonathan Simon-Alastair Thompson Report]
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm

[The Berkeley report:]
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/ [scroll down to
"Voting": "The Effects of Electronic Voting
Machines..."]

[04 Election in Ohio:]
http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/2004_Ohio_Irregularities

[a great general resource:] http://en.wikipedia.org

Some other good sites: www.votersunite.org,
www.verfiedvoting.org, www.commoncause.org,
www.ballotintegrity.org, www.truevotemd.org,
www.truthout.org, www.commondreams.org

Also, for inspiration - "Granny D"--a fabulous 94
year old woman who ran for Senate in NH:
http://www.grannyd.com/

Info Media: Randi Rhodes, Janeane Garofola, Sam
Seder and Mike Malloy of Air America
(www.airamericaradio.com).
Keith Olberman (MSNBC-Countdown).
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/ And some
interesting Olberman reportage posted at:
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/NewsArticle.cfm?ID=2369


A CURE FOR KERRY VOTER DEPRESSION:

In my opinion, we are one minute to midnight as
to losing our democracy. I figure we've already
gone beyond Germany 1933, to Germany 1934--the
consolidation of all state power. The fascists
now own the presidency, the Congress, the courts,
the media, AND the election system.

It is easy to get scared--or worse, to bury your
head in the sand. The day after the Election,
there were 100,000 hits on the Canadian
immigration site. That's one solution, I guess.
On the other hand, our children and the entire
world are counting on us to restore democracy in
the U.S., especially to stop Bush Inc.'s madness
in the Middle East, and also impending federal
bankruptcy. We are the only ones who can do it.
The rest of the world is far more aware than many
American citizens of how fraudulent this election
was, and how close the parallel is to Germany
1933-34. In Europe, they've lived it. And they
are pulling for us.

We were born to--or consciously chose--the great
heritage of American democracy. It has fallen to
us to try to save it, in what looks to be its
final hour. It is a time for clarity, unity and
focused action. I think it's panic-inducing to
try to address the million issues raised by Bush
Inc. actions and policy, and a delusion to think
that the Left can influence them or can re-gain
power, after what they've pulled in this
election. Our right to vote is first and
fundamental, and we must salvage it--by trying to
overturn this election; and by focused, state by
state efforts to achieve, a) paper trail; b) open
source code (Congress isn't going to do this!).
But it's not up to you or me alone. It's a
collective burden. So don't let yourself get
depressed or feeling powerless. Take care of
yourself; help create a sustainable local
economy; think creatively of other important ways
of collective action (there is a corporate news
media product boycott in the works, for
instance). And make time to write that letter,
send that donation, spread the word--and do more
if we can. Together, we shall overcome.

Mary Pjerrou
November 24, 2004
Elk, CA