The Big Fix
By Chris Floyd
The Moscow Times
4-7-5
Let's face the facts. The game is over and we -- the "reality-based
community," the believers in genuine democracy and law, the heirs of
Jefferson and Madison, Emerson and Thoreau, the toilers and dreamers,
all those who seek to rise above the beast within and shape the brutal
chaos of existence into something higher, richer and imbued with
meaning -- have lost. The better world we thought had been won out of
the blood and horror of history -- a realm of enlightenment that often
found its best embodiment in the ideals and aspirations of the
American Republic -- is gone. It's been swallowed by darkness, by
ravening greed, by bestial spirits and by willful primitives who now
possess overwhelming instruments of power and dominion.
A gang of such spirits seized control of the U.S. government by
illicit means in 2000 and maintained that control through rampant
electoral corruption in 2004. The re-election of President George W.
Bush last November was a deliberately shambolic process that saw
massive lockouts of opposition voters; unverifiable returns compiled
by easily hackable machines operated by avowed corporate partisans of
the ruling party; and vast discrepancies between exit polls and final
results - gaps much larger than those that led elections in Ukraine
and Georgia to be condemned as manipulated frauds. Indeed, a panel of
statisticians said last week that the odds of such a discrepancy
occurring naturally were 959,000 to 1, the Akron Beacon-Journal
reported.
The copious documentation of the Bush fraud keeps growing. Last month,
experts using actual machines and returns from the 2004 election
showed Congress how a lone hacker could skew a precinct's results by
100,000 votes without leaving a trace. More than 40 million votes in
30 states were cast on such computer systems, BlackBoxVoting noted.
Late last year, Congress heard sworn testimony from Florida programmer
Clint Curtis, who created vote-rigging software in 2000 at the request
of Tom Feeny, a Bush Family factotum. Feeny wanted Curtis (a fellow
Republican) and his employer, Yang Enterprises, to produce untraceable
programs that could "control the vote" as needed, investigator Brad
Friedman reported. Feeny also told Curtis of Bush plans to "suppress
the black vote" with "exclusion lists." This is exactly what happened.
BBC investigator Greg Palast has shown that tens of thousands of
legitimate African-American voters were deliberately "purged" from the
rolls by a private Republican-controlled corporation hired by Florida
Governor Jeb Bush. Afterwards, Feeny -- who had been Jeb's running
mate in his first gubernatorial campaign -- was rewarded for his
dutiful service with a plum congressional seat.
In 2002, Raymond Lemme, a Florida state government inspector, took up
Curtis' charges, which included other corruption allegations involving
Feeny, Yang Enterprises and a Yang employee charged with peddling
military technology to the Chinese. In June 2003, Lemme told Curtis he
had "tracked the corruption all the way to the top" and that "the
story would break in a few weeks." On July 1, 2003, Lemme was found
dead in a Georgia hotel room, just across the Florida border.
Local police ruled that Lemme, a happily married man eagerly planning
his daughter's wedding, had suddenly decided to slash his wrists. At
first they said there were no photos of the death scene; but then the
pictures turned up on the Internet and were confirmed as authentic by
the embarrassed police. The photos clearly contradicted the original
suicide report on several points -- presenting evidence, for example,
that Lemme had been beaten before his death. The investigation was
reopened after Curtis' Congressional testimony -- and then abruptly
shut down after local police spoke to a never-identified "someone" in
the Florida state government.
Needless to say, nothing has been done to clarify the murk surrounding
Lemme's convenient death. Nor has there been any action toward
rectifying the highly profitable degradation of the American electoral
process -- beyond the appointment of yet another "blue-ribbon panel"
of Establishment worthies to oversee "election reform." The
seriousness of this endeavor can be seen in the man appointed to
co-chair the effort: James Baker, the notorious Bush family fixer (and
Saudi bagman) who spearheaded the sabotage of the 2000 vote in
Florida. Baker's presence on the panel ensures that nothing will be
done to lessen the ruling clique's chokehold on power.
So let's have no illusions about where we are. Gangsters are in
charge, and nothing and no one will be allowed to challenge their
dominion. They are waging aggressive war to cement their position and
that of their allies: the energy barons, the arms merchants, the
construction and services cartels, the investment bankers. These power
blocs now command monstrous resources and unfathomable profits; they
can buy out, buy off or bury any force that opposes them. Meanwhile,
they use the loot of the stolen Republic -- its blood and treasure --
as fuel for their ever-expanding war machine: Bush now has a "secret
watch-list" of 25 more countries ripe for military intervention, the
Financial Times reported.
With more war crimes afoot, last month Bush issued an official
"National Defense Strategy" that openly declares "judicial processes"
as one of the enemies confronting the United States, actually equating
them with terrorism, The Associated Press reported. Law is "a strategy
of the weak," says the Bush Doctrine, in a chilling echo of Hitlerian
machtpolitik: Might makes right. The judicial process must not be
allowed to "constrain or shape" American behavior in any way, the
gangsters declared.
Think of it: Law is now the enemy. Democracy, as we've seen above, is
the enemy. This, the demented code of criminals and tyrants, has
become the ruling doctrine of the United States -- replacing the
Constitution, replacing the noble struggle for liberty and
enlightenment with the howl of the beast, with a freak show of avarice
and death.
Annotations
The Death of Raymond Lemme
Bradblog.com, March 8, 2005
Clint Curtis Testifies Before Judiciary Committee Panel
Bradblog.com, Dec. 13, 2004
Report to Judiciary Committee: Diebold Machines Hacked
Black Box Voting, March 8, 2005
Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption
Akron Beacon Journal, April 1, 2005
US Scatters Bases to Control Eurasia
Asia Times, March 30, 2005
US Draws Up List of Unstable Countries
Financial Times, March 28, 2005
Bush: U.S. To Bear Burden of Iraq Costs
Associated Press, April 4, 2005
Oil prices soar above 58 dollars for first time
Agence France Press, April 4, 2005
US Taxpayers Give Lion's Share To Military
PNN Online, April 4, 2005
National Defense Strategy: Legal Challenges, Terrorism Threaten U.S.
Associated Press, March 18, 2005
Defense Strategy OKs First Strikes
Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2005
The Bush-Cheney Media Enterprises
AlterNet, April 3, 2005
US relied on 'drunken liar' to justify Iraq war
The Observer, April 3, 2005
Long Before WMD Panel, Evidence Showed Bush Wanted War Despite
Intelligence
A Tiny Revolution, March 31, 2005
If You Build It, They Will Kill
TomDispatch, April 1, 2005
Military Bases Abroad are Expanding
The Nation, March 31, 2005
Coordinated attack on your voting rights happening Now
Daily Kos, March 31, 2005
Bechtel Sees Record Revenue in 2004
San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 2005
The New Aristocracy
Providence Journal, March 28, 2005
Top Bush Insider Joins Halliburton
Washington Examiner, March 22, 2005
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