Voting On Earth-- If You're A Democrat

Commander Edward Michael Fincke and Flight Engineer and Science Officer Greg Chamitoff may be orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour onboard the International Space Station some 220 miles above the planet, but they will voting in Tuesday's election. By means of a secure electronic ballot uplinked by NASA's Mission Control Center their choices will be transmitted to Houston by secret e-mail and officially recorded.

That virtuoso display of American space technology, accomplished (believe it or not) by our very own government, makes the state of our voting franchise all the more disgraceful and depressing.



Beyond the obvious fact that those ESS machines were made on the absolute cheap, it appears that either a) the software errors were result of sloppy programming, or b) these pathetic machines have been strategically placed and designed to malfunction.

Voter Suppression in the good-old-USA is as old as the Republican Party. Funny thing-- seeing that originally it was Republicans whose votes were not being counted.

Between 1866 and 1869, Congress enacted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing blacks' civil rights and giving black men the right to vote.

The Republicans had for the first time enshrined in American law the principle that the rights of citizens could not be abridged because of race. And they led directly to the creation of new governments in the South elected by blacks as well as white - America's first experiment in interracial democracy.

Lincoln's assassination saw his Democratic successor, President Johnson, pardon the Southern Confederates who immediately tried to abridge the rights of the Republican Freedmen. Ironically, it would be another Democratic President named Johnson, who restored those denied civil rights and in doing so renewed the urge to repress the black vote.

After the 1964 Voting Rights Act saw whites and blacks switch parties the Old South's (anti)-Democratic tactics were soon copied by Republicans up north. As Sherry F. Colb, Professor and Judge Frederick B. Lacey Scholar at Rutgers Law School-Newark explains:

The reason for the intimidation is plain: According to the NAACP report, in the last few decades, "African American voters have [become more] been loyal to the Democratic Party, resulting in the prevalence of Republican efforts to suppress minority turnout."

In 1981's "model" effort, the Republican National Committee and the New Jersey Republican State Committee engaged in "widespread challenging of individual voters and an Election Day presence at African American and Latino precincts featuring armed guards and dire warnings of criminal penalties for voting offenses."

When not relying on mis-tabulation and overt intimidation, Republicans have turned to using the Federal government's recent HAVA rules to suppress the vote in minority districts.

Right now in Florida over 12,000 voters statewide are being forced to cast provisional ballots because of discrepancies between their registration forms and driver license numbers or Social Security numbers in government databases. Unsurprisingly, the list includes a disproportionate number of African-Americans, Hispanics, and voters in Democratic strongholds in South Florida. Here is what Time magazine had to say about Ohio and the proposed "No Match No Vote law."

Our now famous, "Joe the plumber" is not registered to vote. The man known to his mother as Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, is inscribed in Ohio's Lucas County registration records as "Worzelbacher," a problem of penmanship more than anything else. "You can't read his signature to tell if it is an o or a u," explains Linda Howe, the local elections director.

Such mistakes riddle the nation's voting rolls, but they did not matter much before computers digitized records. The misspelled Joes of America still got their ballots. But after the voting debacle in 2000, Congress required each state to create a single voter database, which could then be matched with other data, such as driver's licenses, to detect false registrations, dead people and those who have moved or become "inactive." In the marble halls of Congress, this sounded like a great idea — solve old problems with new technology. But in the hands of sometimes inept or partisan state officials, the database matches have become a practical nightmare that experts fear could disenfranchise thousands.

Ohio's Secretary of State does not think that voters should lose their rights because of clerical errors but the Bush Justice Department has just filed suit to purge 200,000 new Ohio voters.

Elsewhere the purges remain old-fashioned. A county official in Georgia removed 700 people from voter lists, purportedly for being felons, even though many had never received so much as a parking ticket. Another Georgia voter purge, which seeks to remove illegal immigrants from the rolls, has been challenged by voting-rights groups that say legal voters have been intimidated by repeated requests to prove their citizenship. Back in Mississippi last March, an election official wrongly purged 10,000 people from the voting rolls — including in an ironic twist a Republican congressional candidate — while using her home computer. (After that the names were restored in time for the primary.)

When all else fails, the easiest Republican ploy is simply to under-provide machines in Democratic precincts and then reduce the number of voting hours as they recently did in Florida. Sure enough, just like in 2000 and 2004 the lines are appalling long, even for those who show up bright and early:



To Governor Crist's credit he has ordered the hours of voting to be extended earning the ire of his Republican brethren, but surely citizens in a country that boasts of being the world's "oldest and greatest democracy" should be able to vote in a safe and timely fashion without being launched into outer space.

Here's How We Help:

1. If you know anyone in Florida who registered to vote this year, check the list of rejected voter registrations to see if their name is on the list. If you are one of those wonderful souls who has volunteered to register voters in Florida, you might want to check the list for the names of any people you registered whose names you might remember.

2. If a person's name is on the list, they need to contact their County Supervisor of Elections Office to determine the problem and rectify it immediately. (You'll find a list of Florida's election offices here). Sometimes the problem is as simple as a misplaced number written down on the form or an error in one of the government databases (imagine that!). Voters need to show the elections office proof of the correct information, preferably a driver's license or a state-issued ID or Social Security card. Often the problem can be resolved via fax or e-mail.

3. If a person is on this list and resolves the problem before Election Day, I would encourage that person to vote early if at all possible, and not wait until Nov. 4, just to make sure there are no lingering problems. Here's a list of Florida's early voting sites.

4. Common Cause is running phone banks to contact all 12,185 people on the no-match list. If you want to volunteer to help, e-mail DCressman (at) Commoncause.org

Gutting America

The American public is being challenged to rebel. Make no mistake, this $700 billion "bail-out" package will spell the end of our representative government. Understand-- the world knows that these mortgage assets Paulson proposes to repurchase are overvalued and the U.S. is headed for a major recession. So what is all that "cash for trash" supposed to pay for and where will it come from?-- simple-- China, who the global financiers are helping to buy the United States of America.

The de facto nationalization of the financial heavyweights will anchor the US and global financial market, analysts agreed. "It is good news for Chinese holders of mortgage-backed debt in the two companies," said Dong Yuping, an economist with the institute of finance and banking at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "If the US government hadn't extended a helping hand, their insolvency would have brought serious losses to Chinese holders."

The deal was also done to prevent the government-sponsored companies from being declared insolvent, so it clearly benefits bond holders, said Stephen Green, a senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai.

The two companies account for $5 trillion worth of mortgages in the US - about 40 percent of its national total. Some $1.5 trillion of the debt is held by foreign investors.

"Since the US government intervened, the risks for Chinese holders have become fairly marginal," She Minhua, a Shanghai-based economist, said.

But the government bailout will not improve the US housing market's fundamentals.

Here is what a serious adjustment would entail:
Whenever there is a systemic banking crisis there is a need to recapitalize the banking/financial system to avoid an excessive and destructive credit contraction. But purchasing toxic/illiquid assets of the financial system is not the most effective and efficient way to recapitalize the banking system. Such recapitalization – via the use of public resources – can occur in a number of alternative ways: purchase of bad assets/loans; government injection of preferred shares; government injection of common shares; government purchase of subordinated debt; government issuance of government bonds to be placed on the banks’ balance sheet; government injection of cash; government credit lines extended to the banks; government assumption of government liabilities.

Instead, besides being unable to rebuild our decaying infrastructure or invest in alternative energy, the American taxpayer will be servicing debts held by foreign banks. Faced with corresponding losses most foreign banks are choosing to nationalize while keeping the onus for repayment on the banking industry.

"All UK banks with less than 65 percent of loans funded by deposits have now been nationalized or sold," Alex Potter, banks analyst at Collins Stewart, said.

While the public takeover puts even more risky assets on to the government's books only seven months after the nationalization of Northern Rock bank, Darling said the risk would be borne by the banking industry through a compensation scheme.

But while sensible countries look to shield their taxpayers what Paulson and Congress are proposing amounts to wholesale theft. For once I can say kudos to the NYTimes for exposing the rats:

"Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

"Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

"At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.

"Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury's proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions."

Mr. Paulson can choose to buy from any financial institution that does business in the United States, or from pension funds, with wide discretion over what he will buy and how much he will pay. Under most circumstances, banks owned by foreign governments are not eligible for the money, but under some conditions, the secretary can choose to bail out foreign central banks.

Under the bill, the Treasury is to buy the securities at prices he deems appropriate. Mr. Paulson may set prices through auctions but is not required to do so.

Rarely if ever has one man had such broad authority to spend government money as he sees fit, with no rules requiring him to seek out the lowest possible price for assets being purchased.

That any legally elected Congress would sit still for such a blatant power-grab supports my suspicion that the vote-rigging that was exposed by the Bush coup of 2000 is an open bipartisan affair. The culture war with its steady nurturing of the nation's historical tendencies towards ethnic bigotry and religious zealotry and exacerbated by a phony red state/blue state divide has been the corporate smoke-screen for the slow, tactical destruction of our democracy.

Remember how this all started. It was the Dodd/Shelby bail-out plan that first allowed borrowers to not only receive rates the market wouldn't approve them for, but it would even artificially reduce their loan amounts. It also bought billions of bad loans that banks wanted to offload.

Those following the progress of the Dodd-Shelby mortgage rescue plan in the Senate might want to check out two solid pieces of enterprising reporting on the bill this weekend.

First, the Examiner's Tim Carney reports that the bailout section of the Dodd-Shelby bill is, in the words a lobbyist, "exactly what Bank of America and Countrywide wanted."

Is there a connection between Bank of America and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.)? There is. Carney: "Bank of America's political action committee (PAC) has donated $20,000 to Dodd since he became chairman of the banking panel 17 months ago. From January 2007 to March 2008, Bank of America employees have donated at least $50,400 to Dodd's campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics."

National Review's the Corner follows up, citing an internal Bank of America document:

"National Review Online has obtained an internal Bank of America "discussion document" (PDF here) on the subject of the FHA Housing Stabilization and Homeownership Retention Act of 2008, a.k.a. the Dodd-Shelby mortgage-lender bailout bill .... This discussion document (dated March 11, 2008) would appear to support the contention that BofA essentially wrote the bailout section of the bill."

Then there are these murky questions surrounding Chris Dodd and congressional corruption:

Lobbyists for the Texas Indian tribe that shelled out $4.2 million three years ago in a failed bid to get Congress to reopen a closed casino told the tribe that U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd had been "greased" to get his help, its longtime consultant confirmed last week.

Dodd denies there was any quid pro quo yet two Democrats, Brian Lunde and George Burger paid $10,000 to a lobbyist linked to the senator, Lottie Shackelford, to secure the senator's support for the single-sentence rider that would have unshuttered the casino closed by Texas authorities.

Also, Federal Election Commission records show that Shackelford, now vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, contributed $1,000 to Dodd in June 2002, four months before the passage of the notorious Help America Vote Act which allowed for non-certifiable electronic voting machines to be used in US elections.

Dodd, in his statement at the Indian Affairs Committee hearing, acknowledged that Shackelford "did approach my office during the waning hours of negotiations over the HAVA legislation to inquire whether recognition proposals for the Tigua tribe could be included in the bill."

The FEC records also show that Dodd collected $10,000 in contributions in 2002 and 2003 from four individuals and a political action committee associated with the big lobbying firm that employed Abramoff, Greenberg Traurig.

We know the enemy. He resides not in the wilds of Alaska or West Virginia, but in the off-shore banks, the corporate boardrooms and now plainly, the halls of Congress.