Another Veteran's Day: Dilemma

A Veteran Struggles With His Past

Was Iraq a just a mistake? Many veterans will tell you that the war they experienced doesn't end when they come home. That's true for Adan Pulido, who's found himself stuck between a vow "never to forget the past" and the need to put it behind him.

• More: Watch a trailer for Adan Pulido's film "Locker Room Politics"

Targeted Killings (assassinations)

US public supports targeted killing

Obama's use of drones to deal with the new generation of terrorists spawned by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan creates an ongoing cycle of never ending war. His questionable actions, using highly classified unmanned drone strikes in "targeted killings" by the CIA against young leaders opposed to the US Wars, identified by a 'disposition matrix', is becoming an cheap and easy institutional solution to a complex problem. Blowback is inevitable as innocent civilians are always 'collateral damage' in such covert wars.

Naureen Shah, Columbia University

As a new form of warfare, Naureen Shah: Associate Director of Columbia Law School's Counter-terrorism and Human Rights Project, says that these secret CIA attacks constitute a dangerous legacy that, without any limits, will be passed on to the next President, who may use this tool more liberally than Obama.

This can not be the extent of our counter-terrorism policy. We must have a spectrum of tools, including components of education, financial aid, medical services, trade, media, and even ground force if necessary. If the 'flexibility' of a shadow war with criminals is a necessity in a global society, then we need to debate the technology of targeted killings, to make their use transparent and accountable, both to our own public, as well as the community of international law. Conspiring to preform covert assassinations in the dark night of an indefinite war is the antithesis of American norms of liberty and justice. If this deadly tool falls into the hands of a Republican President in a couple of weeks, we may all regret our timid inaction.

Child Terrorist killed by Obama Drone Strike

Many people are targeted via the disposition matrix by a "Pattern of Action", these attacks kill groups of people, convoys, parties, households of people who we associate with those individuals we would target. This is inconsistent with our national values. There are no ground rules. Without eyes on the ground, the risk of 'collateral damage' killing unforeseen innocent civilians is too great to justify  The CIA should never have authorization to use force, all drones should be under the control of the US Military, subject to all the legal, civilian, and moral oversite of military regulation.

Hezbollah is already using Iranian drones, the US is selling this technology around the world. It is inevitable that other countries will develop drone technology and be used against US targets, both globally and domestically. We have set the president for such killings, and weather we call it terrorism or murder, it will be blowback from our own unethical actions.  - learn more at To The Point

Rules for Radicals, Saul D. Alinsky, published in 1971

The rules

• RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
• RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
• RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
• RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
• RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
• RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
• RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.
• RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
• RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
• RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
• RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
• RULE 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Architects & Engineers - Solving the Mystery of WTC 7 - AE911Truth.org

Join Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

Rape in the US Military

"No one at the top is going to prosecute this." - Director of the Invisible War

What it is like to go to war

Metals for the nature of evil. Genetic, amygdala short-circuit, religions.

The Invisible War

Although well known inside military circles, the fact of military rape by our own soldiers has reached critical proportions. One in three women in the military are victims of sexual assault by their fellow troops, as well as one in five men. That means that their are thousands of rapists in the military, and when they reenter the civilian world, they all become the sexual predators that assault our wives and children.
http://invisiblewarmovie.com/

The Battle of Blair Mountian 1921

These miners knew the dynamics of capitalism and the role of government. They knew who their friends and enemies were. They knew that only by organizing and physically defying centers of power would they ever get justice. They did not trust authority. They did not wait for authority figures to dole out justice. They were not seduced by the empty rhetoric of politicians. They knew that if they wanted a better world they would have to be their own leaders. They would have to fight for it. And this is a lesson in the nature of corporate and governmental power that we have forgotten. We must make the powerful afraid of us if we are to get any semblance of an open and free society. They are not and never will be on our side.

It is an old and cruel tactic in any company town. Reduce wages and benefits to subsistence level. Break unions. Gut social assistance programs. Buy and sell elected officials and judges. Fill the airwaves with mindless diversion and corporate propaganda. Pay off the press. Poison the soil, the air and the water to extract natural resources and leave behind a devastated wasteland. Plunge workers into debt. Leave them owing more on their houses than the structures are worth. Make sure the children will be burdened by tens of thousands of dollars lent to them for an education and will be unable to find decent jobs. Make sure that everything from hospital bills to car payments to credit card fees exact increasing pounds of flesh. And when workers stumble, when they cannot pay soaring interest rates, jack up rates further and deploy predators from debt collection agencies to harass the debtors and seize their assets. Then toss them away. Company towns all look the same. And we live in the biggest one on earth. - Chris Hedges

“It is freedom or death, and your children will be free,” Mother Jones told the miners. “We are not going to leave a slave class to the coming generation, and I want to say to you the next generation will not charge us for what we have done; they will charge and condemn us for what we have left undone.”

The coal companies have erased this piece of history from school textbooks. It is too inconvenient. It exposes predatory capitalism’s ruthless commodification and exploitation of human beings and the natural world. It exposes the drive by corporations to keep us impoverished, disempowered and unorganized. If corporate forces can sanitize history, if they can ensure historical amnesia, then the doctrine of laissez faire economics—which in short promises that the wealthier that rich people get, the better it is for all of us—can continue to rule our lives.

All the gains, often paid for with the lives of working men and women, have now been reversed. We are back where we started. We must organize, resist and build movements. We must embrace radical politics and remain perpetually alienated from power or become a subjugated herd. I do not call for an emulation of this violence. But I do call for direct and sustained confrontation with all formal mechanisms of power, including the Democratic Party. The corporate state, for its part, should also remember the lesson from Blair Mountain. There are limits to how far a people can be pushed. And if violence continues to be the preferred mechanism for control, if the state refuses to institute rational economic and political reforms to address the growing misery that corporations inflict on the citizens, it will, as at Blair Mountain, engender a violent response.

 We can do it the easy way or the hard way.

ETHOS

What happens when the majority of voters, with full informed consent, freely choose to relinquish their democratic soverignty to the wealth and power?

 ETHOS

- a Greek word meaning "character" that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology.

http://www.ethosthemovie.com/

FROM PETE MCGRAIN, writer/director of ETHOS - 

Most of us are in the habit of voting once every few years and expecting our elected officials to take care of us. In this way we have ‘opted out’ of the process and while we are opted out abuse creeps in. It is clear that just voting once every few years is not working. 

In a very real sense you and I are responsible for everything that is wrong with our system and our planet. When we consume our resources recklessly it is you and I that cause the pollution and the waste and destruction of our planet. Our consumer demand is the power that drives corporations to abuse other nations, stealing their resources to sell them to us, sending our waste to their countries for disposal, encouraging child labor and causing war.
The profits abusive companies make from the money we give them ‘empowers’ them. With the profits from ‘our’ money they have weakened ‘our’ democracy. They have the power to put ‘their men’ in a position to regulate them. 

Our governments, in a very real sense, are now run by multinational businessmen. The businessmen now own all of the mainstream media so our information is tainted. This has all happened while we were all opted out. Yes, each and every one of us shares the blame. However, because it is our behavior that has caused this mess, our behavior can fix it. 

The most important message of this film is about you and I taking responsibility, learning the facts about what is happening in our world and then acting accordingly. Your consumer choices are the most easily available and powerful way for you to get active. Do not underestimate the power you have right in your hands. No company can continue a practice or a product that you will not buy! This is vitally important information and if you can understand this we are on our way to an incredible new future. But keep in mind, spending less is the primary objective. Having more money does not give you more power if the objective is to spend less.
More...

Victoria Grant, my new hero.

Debt Money and Fraud in Canada
How come adults can't understand what this 12 year old girl can state so clearly?

Have you ever wondered why Canada is in debt? Have you ever wondered why the government forces Canadians to pay so many taxes? Have you ever wondered why the bankers from the largest private banks are becoming wealthier, and the rest of us are not? Have you ever wondered why the gross national debt is over $800 billion dollars? Or why we are spending $160 million dollars a day on the interest of the national debt? That is $60 billion dollars a year! Have you ever wondered who receives the $60 billion dollars?
What I have discovered is the banks and the government have colluded to financially enslave the people of Canada.
I will share with you three important points of reference which will hopefully spark enough interest and concern for you to continue the research on your own and to engage your government to stop this criminal act against the people of Canada.
First, we will briefly examine the Bank of Canada.
Second, we will see how the banking system works today.
And lastly, I will offer a viable solution that we can petition our government to implement.
A very little known figure in Canadian history is Gerald Grattan McGeer. He was a lawyer, a Member of Parliament and Mayor of Vancouver. His contribution to Canada is probably one of the greatest in our history. He championed the creation of the National Bank of Canada whose sole purpose is to create and manage Canada’s money. It was formed on July 3rd, 1934 and owned by all Canadians.
Until the 1970’s, because of the Bank of Canada, Canada’s national debt was held at a constant manageable level until the government decided to implement what we now have as our modern banking system that is robbing the Canadian people. So how are they robbing us?
Allow me to explain how our private banks and government work today: first the Canadian government borrows money from the Private Banks. They then lend the debt based money to Canada, with compounded interest. The government then continues to increase taxation of Canadians, year after year, in order to pay back the interest on the exponentially growing national debt. What results is inflation, less real money for Canadians to spend into our economy, and the real money being used to pad the pockets of the banks.
As well, the government gave the banks the ability to loan out money that doesn’t exist in the form of loans. When a bank actually gives you a mortgage, which literally means a ‘death pledge’ or a loan, the banks do not actually give you money. They click a key on a computer and generate the fake money out of thin air. They don’t actually have it in their bank vaults. Presently, the banks only have 4 billion dollars on reserve BUT they have loaned out over 1.5 Trillion dollars.
To quote Graham Towers, “Each and every time a bank makes a loan, a new bank credit is created-new deposits-brand new money. Broadly speaking, all new money comes out of a bank in the form of loans. As loans are debt, then under the present system all money is debt.”
What I find interesting is even Jesus in Matthew 21 drove out the money changers in the temple because they were manipulating the currency to steal money from the people.
The private banks are just like the money changers in Matthew 21, They are defrauding and robbing the people of Canada of their money; thus, their freedom and they need to be stopped.
How should the banking system work?
In an infamous interview Mr. McGeer asked Mr. Towers, “Can you tell me why a government with power to create money should give that power away to a private monopoly, and then borrow that which parliament can create itself, back at interest, to the point of national bankruptcy?”
Mr. Towers replied: “If parliament wants to change the form of operating the banking system, then certainly that is within the powers of Parliament.” Source: LYBIO.net
In other words, if the Canadian government needs money, they can borrow it directly from the Bank of Canada. The people would then pay fair taxes to repay the Bank of Canada; this tax money would in turn get injected back into our economic infrastructure and the debt would be wiped out. Canadians would again prosper with real money as the foundation of our economic structure and not debt money.
Regarding, the debt money that is owed the private banks such as the Royal Bank, we would simply have the Bank of Canada print the money owing, hand it over to the private banks, and then clear the debt with the Bank of Canada. And yes, we have the power and lawful right to do so.
In conclusion, it has become painfully obvious, even for me, a 12 year old Canadian, that we are being defrauded and robbed by the banking system and a complicit government.
What will we do to stop this crime? What will we do to ensure that the next generation will live free and clear of the debt based economy that enslaves them on to the bankers?
Margaret Mead said this quote and I hope that all of you remember this “Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Thank you.

American Soldier telling the truth about the killig in Iraq

American soldier tells how they were orderd to kill innocent civilians

A new American Hero: the Whistle-Blower

No matter how crazy it may seem, we in the military will try to follow orders, but in the face of years of failure, we fail to adapt.

Your words and your actions have to match or your intentions make no difference. And that's one of the things we (in the US Military) fail to grasp. - Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis

 Listen to the story of our newest American Hero, Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis on 'To the Point', from KCRW  in . After eleven years in Afghanistan, we still don't see an end in sight, it is past time to leave. Now it is just a training ground for US Troops, and a paycheck for the war profiteers.

Read the full story at the New York Times.

“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?“ Colonel Davis asks 

From Armed Forces Journal:

“No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan,” he says in the article. “But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.” 

TELL THE TRUTH

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start.

“For Colonel Davis to go out on a limb and help us to understand what’s happening on the ground, I have the greatest admiration for him,” said Representative Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina

Corporations Are Not PEOPLE, and money is not SPEECH!

Corporations Are Not People

Wednesday 1 February 2012

by: Thom Hartmann, Truthout | Book Review

(Image: Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

"Corporations Are Not People"
Jeffrey D. Clements
Donate to Truthout to receive a copy of "Corporations Are Not People," this week's Progressive Pick.

Most Americans don't realize that the idea that "corporations are people" and "money is speech" are concepts that were never, ever considered or promoted or even passed by any legislature in the history of America. Neither were they ever promoted or signed into law by any president - if anything, the opposite, with presidents from Grover Cleveland in 1887 to Barack Obama in 2010 condemning them.

And Congress and the executive branch are the two of the three branches of government that are elected by the people, and thus the only two to which the founders of this country and the framers of the Constitution gave the right to create laws.

The Supreme Court is so much not supposed to create law, that Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution even says that it must operate "under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."

Nonetheless, as I pointed out in 2001 in my book "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People," the Supreme Court itself has invented, out of whole cloth, the doctrines of corporations as people and money as speech.

Now comes into our political milieu a new and significant contribution to the literature of "corporate personhood" (available directly from Truthout).  Jeff Clements, a former assistant attorney general for Massachusetts, has written a brilliant and very accessible guide to the 2010 US Supreme Court Citizens United decision, how it came about and what can be done about it.

Most interestingly, Jeff's book also tracks the rise of corporate power over the past 40 years since Lewis Powell wrote his infamous memo to his friend and neighbor, who was the head of the US Chamber of Commerce - which led to everything from the Federalist Society to the Heritage Foundation.

Clements suggests that the modern revival of the doctrine of corporate personhood, which first appeared back in 1819 in the Dartmouth case, reached its 19th-century zenith with a misunderstood Santa Clara County, California, decision. It came into full flower in 2010 with the Citizens United ruling, which was, in fact, a direct child of that 1973 memo by Powell and subsequent corporate and Republican implementation of his recommendations.

"Corporations Are Not People" is accessible, readable, and fascinating. It's the book you want to hand to your co-worker or brother-in-law when they start spouting corporate drivel that they heard from Limbaugh or Romney.  It's a nice, tight summary of the modern application of this doctrine, with a quick overview of its history, particularly its contemporary implications.

And Jeff hasn't just written a book.

With his friend and colleague John Bonifaz, he's co-founded freespeechforpeople.org - one of a half-dozen or so very accessible and well-done efforts to build grassroots support for a constitutional amendment that repudiates the notion that corporations are people and that money is speech.

As the movement grows to take back our rights under the Constitution from the transnational corporations that have hijacked them (and taken our legislators captive), "Corporations Are Not People" (with a foreword by Bill Moyers) will become an increasingly important handbook to the movement. It brilliantly makes the case for us all to recite the mantra, "Corporations are not people, and money is not speech!" and then to do something about it.

Don't just get one copy from Truthout- you will want to be passing this book around to everybody you know!

***

Thom Hartmann interviews Jeff Clements, Part I:

Thom Hartmann interviews Jeff Clements, Part II:

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Democracy Now with Chris Hedges lawsuit against Obama on 2012-NDAA

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges has filed suit against President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes controversial provisions authorizing the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world, without charge or trial. Sections of the bill are written so broadly that critics say they could encompass journalists who report on terror-related issues, such as Hedges, for supporting enemy forces. "It’s clearly unconstitutional," Hedges says of the bill. "It is a huge and egregious assault against our democracy. It overturns over 200 years of law, which has kept the military out of domestic policing." We speak with Hedges, now a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and former New York Times foreign correspondent who was part of a team of reporters that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. We are also joined by Hedges’ attorney Carl Mayer, who filed the litigation on his behalf in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. [includes rush transcript]

US Military Secret: Females attacked by their fellow soldiers more than enemies, and homosexual rape is rampit.

Heads up all you unemployed, Military Recruiters are looking forward to IRAN!

But military rape is not only a womens' issue. According to the Veterans Affairs Office, 37% of the sexual trauma cases reported last year were men. "Men are even more isolated than women following rape," Bhagwati says. "Because it has an even bigger social stigma."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/dec/09/rape-us-military

Rape in the US military: America's dirty little secret

www.guardian.co.uk

 

A female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. Lucy Broadbent reports

From Truthout: Occupy Elections

Occupy Rigged Elections: A Call for the Second American Revolution in 2012

Tuesday 27 December 2011

by: Victoria Collier and Ronnie Cummins, Truthout | Op-Ed

A protester with the Occupy movement is led away by law enforcement after interrupting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at a campaign event for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. (Photo: Eric Thayer / The New York Times)

When candidates emerge who support the positions and demands of the 99 percent, the more certain we can be that our elections will be rigged.

A great battle is coming. The 2012 elections are our chance to turn the tide back toward real democracy, but we must begin immediately. Only by organizing for a democratic revolution now can we break the hold of corporate criminals over our elections and take real power in 2012, legitimately and nonviolently.

Thanks to Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent movement, millions of Americans are finally shaking off the depression and torpor of the past decade, heeding the mass-consciousness call to reclaim power from corporatist forces that have hijacked our country, our planet, and our future. We may not all have taken to the streets yet, but we will. Or we'll contribute in other creative, personally liberating ways, pitching in with prison-break fervor to unblock the channels of revolutionary energy.

Despite the jeering of the corporate media, the Occupy movement is not going to fade away, burn out or be crushed like the radical movements of the 60s and 70s. The Occupy movement is going to change the world, because the world itself has arrived at a momentous crossroads where change is inevitable. Occupy is part of an unstoppable transformation - the contractions of a new world desperate to be born, based on a renewal of community, tolerance, justice and deep respect for all life. A sane, resilient world capable of withstanding the ecological, climatic and economic upheavals we can no longer avoid.

Now is the time to prepare, in this newly awakened, prerevolutionary phase, for Occupy Elections 2012. Because the closer we get to democratically taking power - when candidates emerge who support the positions and demands of the 99 percent - the more certain we can be that our elections will be rigged.

Anarchists and many younger activists today reject representative democracy as unviable. They are rightly disgusted with the macabre, corporate-sponsored, electoral charade we endure every two years like a recurring nightmare. The Occupy movement has already birthed a powerful new form of roots-down direct democracy, where learning to communicate and really hearing each other is the first step toward rebuilding our shattered and alienated communities.

So, do elections matter anymore? Is representative democracy for the People even possible?

Wherever you are on the revolutionary road, whoever you are in your mind and soul, we ask you to please listen to the message we're conveying today, and consider how it impacts your activism in the coming year.

American elections are not going away any time soon. They are rigged, and we must end the rigging - for the sake of our planet and its 7 billion people, entwined in complex technological and social systems that do require some form of representative government to function.

Our electoral process is rigged in the following ways:

• Corporate personhood and the legal determination that money equals speech. 
• Corporate campaign financing and lobbying; billions to buy our elected representatives.
• Corporate restriction of candidate access to the media and to participation in vital debates.
• Corporate media exit polling, which often alters results to manufacture a false "red shift" of rightward-moving electoral outcomes.
• Manipulation of electoral structures and mechanisms
• Partisan redistricting, which re-draws electoral district maps that favor a particular party.
• Voter ID laws that disenfranchise young, poor and minority voters.
• Fraudulent purging of voter rolls, including "caging" - removing a voter from the rolls or discarding their vote based on the return of direct mail to their listed address, a practice found to be used fraudulently and with racial bias, making it illegal under the Voting Rights Act.
• Disenfranchisement of felons, many poor, black or Hispanic, and convicted on drug offenses.
• The centralized rigging of computerized voting machines. 

The battle to topple the corporatocracy must strategically attack all of these points. But for the purpose of this call to action - Occupy Rigged Elections - we're going to focus on the last, least understood bullet point: computerized election fraud.

In the end, how ballots are counted - the central control mechanism of democracy - could prove the easiest piece to reclaim; our first real step toward radically shifting power back toward the people.

Computerized Vote Rigging Is a Democratic Cancer

Undiagnosed, spreading through our nation's bones, centralized election rigging has been undermining the health of our democracy for decades, eating away at it from within, leaving us exhausted and hopeless - though unsure of why we're so sick.

But let's get something clear up front: not every election is rigged, so don't be confused by the few decent people who managed to get into office and stay there. First, ask yourself this question: Have they stopped the corporatist takeover? The answer is no.

Pay attention to the balance of power; watch it tipping ever further toward the corporatist/fascist side of the scale. Meanwhile, the spectacle of democracy maintains a pacified public. In other words, they will let some of "our" people in, or let some of our initiatives pass, while they keep winning more power, overall. Additionally - not all elections are easy to rig, and some have far higher stakes. But there is one constant in the equation:

Every election can be rigged. Undetectably.

If this is news to you, hang on to your hat. Once you understand how the machinery of the American voting system actually works, you're going to feel a little stunned, as if you came home from a three month vacation to discover you left your keys hanging in the front door.

Over the past 40 years - since computers first came online for use in processing and reporting votes - our secretaries of state and election supervisors have literally sold our democratic system to a small criminal cadre of extreme right-wing and religious ideologues who lurk behind shady voting machine companies. The top three are Diebold (purchased by ES&S in 2009), ES&S, and Sequoia Pacific (purchased by Dominion). They manufactured the majority of voting machines and software that secretly count our ballots.

Read it again. Let it sink in.

Yes, it's insane. For this reason alone, we have every reason to have lost faith in electoral democracy, but as you can see, we need to understand why it is failing. We need to know whose big, fat, dirty thumb is on the scale. We need to know how we lost our power before we can hope to reclaim it.

Hand-Counted Paper Ballots NOW!

This is the organic solution. Properly designed, cast in see-through plastic boxes, counted by hand, in public, on election day, with a stringent set of safeguards and a vigilant public  - paper ballots can deliver fast results and provide a fully transparent and accountable voting system. Attempted fraud can be detected and prevented. Conversely, computerized election theft is accomplished secretly, within the "proprietary" software owned by the corporations who manufacture the machines.

Did you know that no one - not even an election supervisor - is allowed to view the software?

Did you know that the Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois just hacked a Diebold Accuvote touch-screen voting machine by remote control with $26 in computer parts?

We know these things because a small group of American election integrity activists have been working tirelessly, without much recognition or compensation, to compile a mountain of evidence:

• Detailing the criminal histories and the partisan and extremist ties of the voting machine manufacturers
• Demonstrating how the machines can be rigged and hacked
• Exposing Department of Justice (DOJ) coverups of election fraud evidence
• Exposing the roll of the corporate media in aiding and abetting election fraud

See the resource list at the end of this article to learn more. Get informed. Take action, and please help us fight back – WE NEED YOU.

Democracy is our birthright, but it has never been fully realized. We've had to fight and die for the right to fight and die for it. It's a dream, a shared vision, a work in progress that has been derailed. Though some activists idealize earlier times - pre-industrial, communal, tribal - we can't go backwards, only forward. What do we want today? Tomorrow? What do we want for ourselves and our children?

We want our damn democracy back.

We want the chance to make it real for the first time, with our own candidates who truly represent the needs of the people, and with a safe voting system accountable to the people.

Help us organize to secure hand-counted paper ballots before the 2012 elections. This is something we can do, if we start now. The stakes of those elections could not be higher.

Join Occupy Rigged Elections on Facebook, started by activists responsible for the historic occupation of the Statehouse in Madison, Wisconsin. They are organizing now to recall Koch-brother puppet Gov. Scott Walker in 2012.

We only have a small window of opportunity. Let's make 2012 the year we took our country back.

To learn more:

www.votescam.org
Www.votescam.org/paper_ballots_now
Www.votescam.org/the_evidence
www.blackboxvoting.org
www.bradblog.org
www.handcountedpaperballots.org
www.electiondefensealliance.org

Visit the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project

On Facebook:

Occupy Rigged Elections
Occupy Voting Booths
Election Integrity
WI Citizens for Election Protection 
Votescam  
Black BoxVoting 

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.