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corporate news monopolies made you and me FEEL as if it HAD BEEN sold.
Demoralizing, disempowering, and, above all, disenfranchising the progressive and peace-minded majority has been the key to the whole Junta. Its power has been an illusion, a trick. You see Bush on the TV all day long and you begin to think he is president. Look for the votes that supposedly gave him that power, and you find TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite electronic voting corporations--in their new voting systems, fast-tracked all over the country during the 2002 to 2004 period, with virtually no audit-recount controls. There were no countable votes in one third of the country, and 0% to 1% auditing in the rest! There were secretly coded ELECTRONS shot at the speed of light from Diebold's and ES&S's central tabulators into an AP computer, thence to your TV screen, where the war profiteering corporate news monopolies DOCTORED the outcome of their own exit polls (Kerry won) to force them to FIT the results of Diebold/ES&S's secret formulae (Bush won)!
It's all an illusion. The people dying in Iraq are not an illusion. Your dwindling income is not an illusion. Everything else is an illusion. Bush and Cheney are in office completely illegitimately, by agreement with the war profiteering corporate news monopolies and certain collusive Democratic leaders (--direct collusion of Sen. Christopher Dodd and DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe in turning our vote counting system over to rightwing Bushite corporations and their secret code; and indirect collusion by about half the Dem leadership who supported the war). These Democratic leaders took care of whoever wasn't already scared shitless by the anthrax letters and Paul Wellstone's state-of-the-art plane falling out of the air on a clear day with no wind. Fear, intimidation, bullying silenced the rest.
I watched this phenomenon--Democrats silencing Democrats--in California. In 2002, we elected a very good Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, just as the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002 was passed by the Anthrax Congress (--the $3.9 billion boondoggle for Diebold and ES&S). Shelley barely had his pencils sharpened before he began to smell a rat--but several elections occurred, including the weird recall election that put Schwarzenegger in office (125 candidates on the ballot) before he had sufficient evidence to sue Diebold for the lies they told about the security of their voting machines. He demanded to see their source code, decertified their touchscreens (no paper trail voting machines), and provided Californians with a paper ballot option, just prior to the 2004 election. The Bushites were thus unable to steal California for Bush(--although I have developed evidence that they did shave votes from Kerry and give them to Bush, to help manufacture and pad Bush's national popular majority).
Shelley was then "swiftboated" out of office, on entirely bogus corruption charges (--there is hardly a politician in the land who was more of a straightshooter than Shelley), while the Democrats, with 2 to 1, and 3 to 2, majorities in the state legislature hid under their desks or actively colluded in his demise, in collusion with Connie McCormack, head of Los Angeles elections--a Diebold shill (does sales brochures for Diebold! --best friend was Diebold's chief salesperson in California), and 17 mostly Republican, and very corrupt, county election officials. The state Democratic leadership strongarmed the good Democrats into silence, and LET THIS HAPPEN, and then colluded with Schwarzenegger to APPOINT a REPUBLICAN Diebold shill to the Secretary of State's office, who immediately began to undo all of Shelley's reforms.
This same phenomenon--corrupt and collusive Democrats--occurred in Congress, when the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" was originally passed, along with the Patriot Act and the Iraq War Resolution. It was all about 'disappearing' our votes.
What happened in Florida's 13th in 2006--18,000 Democratic votes for Congress getting 'disappeared'--happened all over the country in 2004, before anybody had time to catch up with this new, secretly coded, unauditable voting system, owned and controlled by two Bushite corporations (--corporations with nauseating rightwing associations, one tied directly to Bush-Cheney fundraising--Diebold--the other tied by its initial funder, rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, to an extremist 'christian' foundation that touts the death penalty for homosexuals--ES&S--and the two corporations tied TOGETHER, ES&S a spinoff of Diebold, the two corporations run by two brothers).
There is no proof that Bush/Cheney won the 2004 election--and volumes of inferential evidence that they did not. In fact, Bush/Cheney were so unpopular in 2004--with the war lies exposed (no WMDs) and the Abu Ghraib torture--that not even Diebold/ES&S's "trade secret" code could insure their "reelection," and they had to actively, in broad daylight, suppress the black vote in Ohio, in open violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and then had to commit additional felonies to prevent a proper recount (--demanded by the Green and Libertarian Parties). Several Ohio election officials have now gone to jail for their role in preventing the recount. In addition, they had to purge millions of black voters from the voting rolls in places like Florida (using electronic means), and had to 'disappear' tens of thousands of Absentee Ballots in Democratic areas, and commit other crimes.
The Democratic Party leadership (McAuliffe, Brazille) then actively colluded with the corporate media to suppress this story--the most important political news story in our entire history. They 'Iron Curtain'-ed it! It was embargoed. It was verboten. The researchers who put it together--including many scientists--were shut out of the corporate media. The Democratic Party shut it down within the party. People who talked about it were even blackballed on leftist blogs (DKos being a good example), and leftist talk shows (Al Franken), who were both currying favor with the Democratic leadership of the moment. For about a year after the 2004 election, DU was the only place where you could get news of this fraudulent election system, and help with research and development of the facts. Then, finally, it hit "Rolling Stone" (RFK, Jr.'s article). But it is still embargoed by the corporate news monopolies. The only thing that is permitted in the corporate news monopolies are some "questions" about the "security" of the machines. And what our Democratic Congress is doing about it is larding billions more taxpayer dollars on Diebold and ES&S to "fix" the system (--add printers, and a completely inadequate audit).
Illusions.
The only illusion that they "sold," that we "bought," was that we, the peace-minded, progressive majority were ever in the minority. We never were.
Demoralization. Disempowerment. Disenfranchisement.
That's what they did. And we still have too many of these same Democrats in power, who colluded with the Junta on the election system and the war. That's why we can't get Congress to stop the war--or why it's going to be an uphill battle to do so.
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