Showing posts with label Democracy Now. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Democracy Now. Show all posts
Friday, March 20, 2009
De-Cloaking the Economic Scandals
Check out the 3/19/09 Democracy Now episode contains accurate in depth economic reporting on the largest economic scandal in American History.
Matt Tabbi has a great article--The Big Takeover--covering the economic scandal in Rolling Stone.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Did Bush Ever Know Anything?
Finally George is honest enought to admit,"I dunnow." Unfortunately many of us have known this about you all along and seen the disastrous consequences of your "I dunnow" method of governing.
Hopefully this is a final Buzz Buzz on any member of the Bush family who is holding a nationally elected office. "Justice" and "compassion" are not strong suits for this elitist family.
Hopefully accountability and justice will be restored. Lots of veterans from the Iran Contra Scandal were recycled into the George Bush administration and this resulted in bigger disasters. It is absolutely necessary to hold these folks accountable for all the laws they broke...many of them are repeat offenders. We must be diligent and stop these massive criminal activities. We won't even have an idea of where we are and how we got here (much less how to solve our current crisis) without a thorough investigation of what the "'heck has been going on in our Nation's Capital. Some folks are already starting to sift through millions of the missing white house emails that after several years have "surprise" been found.
I always thought it was insane to wiretap the "powerless." I would LOVE to see a bill that demanded that every one of our leaders had to be on tape (unless they were in the bathroom or with family and friends (who were not also government officials). It's the folks in power that we need to keep a good eye on and know what is going on. But so much for my legislative fantasy.
Don't forget if you happen to run into George Bush show him the soles of your shoes. That is his legacy.
On Tuesday afternoon we will have an intelligent competent leader who is going to have to deal with the multiple disasters that Bush has left us. Let's all hope that Obama will do his job with integrity, honesty, competence and compassion.
Buzz....Buzz...
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Lawsuits, Machine Malfunctions and Missing Absentee Ballots Among Voting Rights Issues Facing Jittery Election
This is from the Wednesday, Oct 29, 2008, Democracy Now Report with Amy Goodman. The public is allowed to copy Democracy Now transcripts, so I am posting this very important interview. This is a warning to all you Democrats that you had better be ready to fight tooth and nail for every vote, because the Republican "Brownshirt" Party is going to pull every sleazy, anti-democrtic trick they can think of to suppress your vote.
To watch or hear the original show, CLICK HERE
With the election less than a week away, the battle is on for voting rights. Early voters across the country are reporting long lines and problems with electronic voting machines. Republicans, meanwhile, continue to file lawsuits that could stop thousands from voting. We speak to Harvey Wasserman of Free Press and Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog. [includes rush transcript]
Guests:
Harvey Wasserman, Senior editor of the Ohio-based FreePress.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election and How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008.
Brad Friedman, independent journalist and commentator on election issues. He is the creator of The Brad Blog and has reported extensively on vote rigging.
Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...
AMY GOODMAN: The election is less than a week away. The battle is on for voting rights. Early voters across the country are reporting long lines and problems with electronic voting machines, including vote flipping.
Republicans, meanwhile, continue to file lawsuits that could stop thousands from voting because their registration information does not exactly match government databases. Legal rulings in Wisconsin, Nevada and Ohio have rejected these challenges, and the US Supreme Court also dismissed a case earlier this month relating to 200,000 new voters in the battleground state of Ohio. But last week, the White House got involved and asked the Department of Justice to investigate the integrity of these 200,000 new voter registration forms. Ohio Democratic leaders, as well as the ACLU, have sent letters to the Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, urging him not to intervene in the election dispute in Ohio.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, more than 11,000 voters in Denver have not received absentee ballots because of a mistake made by the company Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia was supposed to have delivered 21,000 ballots to a Denver mail processing facility on October 16, but the company only delivered about half the requested ballots.
I’m joined now by two guests who have been the watchdogs for voting rights. Harvey Wasserman is senior editor of the Ohio-based freepress.org, and he’s co-author of four books on voter rights. What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election and How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008 are among them. He joins me from Columbus, Ohio. We’re also joined via video stream from Los Angeles by independent journalist Brad Friedman. He’s the creator of “The Brad Blog” at bradblog.com and has reported extensively on vote rigging.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Harvey Wasserman, let’s begin with you. Talk about the latest around this issue of the 200,000 new voters’ new voter registration forms.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, the GOP is trying to disenfranchise these 200,000 people by challenging their right to vote, asking the Secretary of State here, Jennifer Brunner, to let the counties investigate and knock off the voter rolls, if they choose to, people who have minor discrepancies in their Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers. And the Secretary of State has rightfully showed that many of these mistakes come from typographical errors when the numbers are entered in at the agencies. And so, essentially, what the GOP is doing is asking to disenfranchise people because of a minor typographical error. We are supporting the Secretary of State in resisting this attempt.
The US Supreme Court has rejected this challenge to these 200,000 voters, but now the Bush administration has ordered or has asked the Attorney General, Mukasey, to get involved. This is reminiscent of the interjection in the 2006 election, when nine federal prosecutors were asked to get involved in alleged voter fraud, which turned out to be nonexistent.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain further what is happening around the White House urging Mukasey to get involved, the ACLU saying he shouldn’t get involved? And go back a little in time to, well, really why his predecessor, why the former Attorney General, Gonzales, actually was forced out of office, resigned.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes. Attorney General Gonzales was forced out of office because he ordered nine federal prosecutors, nine federal employees, to prosecute voter fraud that didn’t exist. The idea was, on the part of the Bush administration, to disenfranchise as many people as possible by federal means in the 2006 election. And essentially, this is a replay here.
In Ohio, 200,000 votes exceeds substantially Bush’s alleged margin of victory in 2004. It’s a lot of votes out of 5.4 million that voted in 2004. So this is a very substantial attack on the ability—this is all about new voters, by the way, who have filed new forms. And it’s a very strong attempt to discourage new voters from coming into the place of voting and to affect the election. 200,000 votes thrown off the voter rolls here would be a very substantial chunk and could actually affect the outcome of the election.
AMY GOODMAN: There was another very important ruling that Bill O’Reilly of Fox was extremely upset about, and it’s the ruling by a federal judge that counties must allow homeless voters to list park benches and other locations that aren’t buildings as addresses.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yeah, well, these people are still citizens. Many of them, in fact, are veterans. And it’s quite ironic that the great patriot Bill O’Reilly would want to disenfranchise veterans.
We are seeing this up and down the line here in Ohio. We had a sheriff in Greene County attempt to disenfranchise students, or at least make a move toward it. You know, there’s always a question whether a student votes at home or on campus, and in Greene County there are a number of colleges, and the sheriff there threatened 308 voters with prosecution based on where they registered to vote. He was forced to back off of that.
And we are having a pretty good counterattack by voting rights advocates in this state, unlike 2004, where the election was essentially stolen without people fighting for it. This time around, I think people are standing up, and it’s going to be, we hope, a very different outcome.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, who’s been challenged time and time again. Also, aren’t there a series of ads that the Republicans have begun running, many times a day, around the issue of voter fraud?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, this is a total red herring. The Cincinnati Enquirer, a conservative Republican paper in Cincinnati, has investigated prosecutions for voter fraud since the 1950s and found less than ten, a bare handful. It’s really a false issue. It is a felony to vote fraudulently, and people just don’t do it. I think the Times, the New York Times, has run a statistic of something like eighteen successful prosecutions of voting fraud throughout the United—voter fraud throughout the United States in the last four or five years. So, it’s really a nonexistent problem. But the Republicans have seized upon it in an attempt to essentially de-legitimize this election and to discourage people from voting. We’ve seen the whole flap with ACORN and other instances where the Republicans are charging that there are massive hordes of people coming in to vote fraudulently. This is just not happening.
But we see a concerted campaign here in Ohio by the Republicans to de-legitimize the Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who we feel has been relatively even-handed. She is not like J. Kenneth Blackwell was in 2004, the co-chair—Blackwell then was the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign running the election. This year, Jennifer Brunner is not the co-chair of the Obama campaign, and we feel that she’s had a pretty good even-handed impact on the election. In fact, she attempted here to provide paper ballots for all who wanted them, who came to the polls and did not want to vote on electronic voting machines. And the Republicans, who control the legislature and the purse strings, screamed that this would cost too much money and have not allowed that to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Harvey, you have written four books on the subject of the elections and votes being stolen. What do you expect in these next—I mean, the election is, well, within a week, less than a week away.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, we expect a mix. We think it’s going to be much, much better than it was in 2004. A study in 2004 showed it took black voters in the state nearly an hour to vote, as opposed to white voters getting in in fifteen minutes or less. We don’t expect that to be rerun. We do expect some problems. We know in 2004 there was a selective shortchanging of black precincts on voting machines. We don’t expect that to happen again.
We will have thousands of observers at the polls, and we are urging everyone who’s interested to come out and be an election observer, come to the polls with a camera and make sure that if people are coming out of the polls with complaints, that they are recorded. And we will have hearings after the election to swear people in with affidavits so they can be used in court cases. In general, we—that their testimony can.
We generally expect a much smoother process this year, we hope, but we are still subject to electronic voting machines. As many as half of the people who vote at the polls on Election Day may be voting on electronic voting machines. We’re already seeing vote flipping from electronic voting machines in other states, as we saw in Ohio in Youngstown and Columbus in 2004. In both cases, people pushed John Kerry, and George Bush lit up. Now we’re seeing people pushing Barack Obama, and John McCain lighting up. We hope that that doesn’t happen again, and we’re going to have to fight that, because it’s very difficult to correct that on Election Day.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, and when we come back, Harvey Wasserman will stay with us, and we’ll be joined by Brad Friedman of Brad Blog. We’ll find out about the Sequoia Voting in Colorado. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re looking at voting around the country. Yes, early voting, millions of people are doing it. Harvey Wasserman with us, senior editor at the Ohio-based freepress.org. His book, How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008, among four books he’s written on voting. Brad Friedman with us, independent journalist with “Brad Blog” at bradblog.com. He has reported extensively on issues of vote rigging.
Talk about Sequoia and Colorado. Welcome, Brad, to the video stream.
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Thank you, Amy. Great to be here.
Yeah, well, Sequoia is one of the big four voting machine companies. Of course, they have failed in state after state. Their most recent failure here—and it’s hard to keep up with them, when it comes to Sequoia—is the 11,000 ballots that they were—absentee ballots that they were supposed to print out and send. They didn’t. They lied about it. And hopefully, once they got caught, now they’ll hopefully be sending them out this week, and hopefully voters will be getting them.
But, to me, by far, the greater concern is these electronic touch-screen machines all over the country, which are beginning to fail in state after state. And officials are claiming it’s a recalibration issue; if they recalibrate the screen, that will take care of it. And I’ve got to say that advising anyone to touch these machines, to insert memory cartridges in them, which is needed for recalibration, while they’re programmed is absolutely insane. And the fact that the Democratic Party is doing little or nothing and allowing these machines to continue to be used, instead of pulling them and requiring folks to vote on paper ballots, is to their shame, and it’s somewhat maddening at this point this many years into this, knowing what we know about these systems.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us more about vote flipping and touch screens in West Virginia, what’s happening there with early voting.
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Sure. And it’s not just—it’s West Virginia, it’s Tennessee, it’s Texas, Missouri, Nevada. Generally, what seems to happen here is people go in and vote for a Democratic straight party ticket or for Barack Obama, and the vote flips to a Republican or some other candidate. We’ve got video of that at bradblog.com that folks can take a look at, see it for themselves. And we’ve actually got an election official showing a machine with one of these problems, showing—suggesting that it’s a calibration—a screen calibration issue, showing how when you vote for one candidate, it flips to another. And then he says, “Look, here we’re recalibrating it now so it will now work fine,” and we actually see that it still doesn’t work fine even after he’s recalibrated it. He tries to make a straight party vote, and it ends up selecting Ralph Nader for president.
These machines need to be pulled out, because even when they work, the problem is that there is absolutely no way to ever verify that any vote ever cast on a touch-screen machine like this has been recorded as per the voter’s intent. It’s strictly impossible, even with a so-called paper trial. And that Democrats aren’t raising holy hell about it is maddening, frustrating and, frankly, to their shame at this point, knowing what we know.
AMY GOODMAN: Brad, let’s turn to some of the problems that have been reported with the electronic voting machines, as you were pointing out. Virginia Methaney from Jackson County, West Virginia, was one of the first people to report a problem with vote flipping last week after her attempt to vote Democrat was flipped to Republican. Videothevote.org spoke to Virginia Methaney about her experience.
VIRGINIA METHANEY: When I pressed to enter my vote for the Democrat, the checkmark jumped to the one above, to the Republican. Well, I pressed the Democrat again, and it jumped up again. So I asked a poll worker. I said, “Well, why would this machine not allow me to vote for my candidate?” She said, “Well”—she said, “It’s got a sensitive screen.” She said, “You’re touching it too hard.” She said, “Just barely use the tip of your fingernail to touch it,” which I did. Then I went to the next candidate, it did the same thing. I voted for the Democrat, it jumped up to the Republican. Well, then she told me, she said, “Just keep pressing the one that you want to vote for, and it will finally take.” Well, I did, and it did stay there, but I proceeded to have problems through—all through the ballot.
After I had the problem voting, I filed a formal complaint with the Secretary of State’s office. And her deputy investigator called me to ask me what happened. I told him. He said, “Well, it sounded like the machines need to be recalibrated, that when they’re moved, sometimes it messes them up.”
AMY GOODMAN: Videothevote.org also spoke to Jackson County, West Virginia county clerk Jeff Waybright about the vote flips on the iVotronic machines.
JEFF WAYBRIGHT: If the poll worker got to a machine and it was out of calibration, this is what would happen. I’m going to touch Barack Obama there, but notice, it jumped clear down to Chuck Baldwin, because the machine is out of calibration. Now it sent me to a screen to vote a write-in ballot. When I hit Barack Obama—the machine is out of calibration—it did not jump up to the Republican candidate, it did not vote a straight Republican ticket, and it did—it jumped down to Chuck Baldwin.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Brad Friedman of “Brad Blog,” what should people do? I mean, we heard from Virginia in West Virginia, and she did file a complaint. How do you know when it takes or if it hasn’t taken? And this whole issue of a receipt for voting, like we get when you get money from an ATM, is there a receipt anywhere in the country?
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Well, and that tape, by the way, of West Virginia of Waybright, as that tape continues, he shows what happens after they recalibrate the system, and the problems still occur. So, to recalibrate in the middle of an election is insane. That’s the most vulnerable point for these systems, where you can insert malicious software and anything else.
As to receipts, no, you don’t get them. You shouldn’t get them, because the fact is, we don’t want people leaving the polls and being able to buy and sell, you know, their vote. That’s why it’s so important to have transparency, to get it right in the first place. And any so-called receipt should be a paper ballot, hand-marked, that we all can go in—every citizen in the country can go in and take a look at after the election and assure that it was in fact counted correctly as per the voter’s intent. That is strictly impossible with any direct-recording electronic—these are usually touch-screen voting machines. It is strictly impossible, no matter what it says on the screen, to know, in fact, that that vote was counted as per the voter’s intent. That’s why these machines are so damn dangerous.
And I was on the air last week in Reno, Nevada with Harry Reid, who actually came on the air and said, “Well, we’re lucky here in Nevada, because we have a paper trail for all of our votes.” Fact is, in Reno, Nevada, they use illegally certified touch-screen machines, yes, with a paper trail, but 100 percent unverifiable as far as whether they’re recording the voter’s intent.
So you’ve got to fight for a paper ballot, you’ve got to ask for one where you’re allowed to have one, and, yes, please, bring a video camera, videotape your vote, put it out there on the web, videothevote.org, end up on YouTube. This time we’ve got to make a lot of noise about what happens. I promise you, if this happens to Republicans, they’ll be making noise. I’m disappointed that the Democratic Party and Barack Obama is not making the noise that they should be and demanding that these machines be removed and voters given paper ballots.
AMY GOODMAN: Brad Friedman, in the case of this West Virginia voter, the woman who described what happened, she’s sitting there with the poll worker showing her what’s happening. So, I mean, this ends privacy in voting. You’ve got to bring in the poll worker and show them who you’re trying to vote for?
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Yeah, that’s—unfortunately, that’s what has to happen, because if you don’t, A, they can’t help you with these machines—they’re very complicated to use—and B, nobody’s going to believe you that this problem occurred in the first place. They probably won’t believe you, even if you do have a poll worker over there. That’s why we’re suggesting people bring their cell phone, their video camera—cell phone video cameras and videotape this experience that they have when a vote jumps from one candidate to another.
But yeah, these are the hoops that we’ve been forced to jump through in order to try to cast our vote, to try and get it counted and to try and get it counted accurately. And after all of these years of, you know, folks like Harvey and myself running around with our hair on fire trying to warn people about this, it’s disappointing, to say the least, to see this going on now in state after state after state. It’s not just West Virginia, I promise you that.
AMY GOODMAN: Again, Brad of “Brad Blog” is joining us by video stream from California. This issue of the emergency declared by Governor Crist in Florida and allowing the lines—allowing the polling places to be extended to twelve hours, Brad, can you talk about this, these extremely long lines in Florida for early voting?
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I can. And frankly, this is to Governor Charlie Crist, a Republican—it’s to his effort, especially in the midst of this all-out Republican war on democracy that we’re seeing all across the country. So I’m going to give Governor Crist credit there for trying to ease the lines. In fact, the Republican legislature had shortened the early voting hours some time ago. And they’re seeing all kinds of problems, all kinds of lines.
The bottlenecks, unfortunately, are tending to be at the registration check-in process. Once again, these computers that are used to check people in to register to vote, that seems to be the bottleneck, because, in fact, the state of Florida has moved to paper ballots. And I’ve seen some of these election registrars—supervisors of election down there in Florida ordering more optical scan machines into the polling places, when that’s not the holdup. The opscan process is done at the end of voting. The holdup is checking people in. The bottleneck is the computers, the voter registration computers.
And this comes back to some of the same draconian processes that, in fact, Charlie Crist did allow to be used, this “no match, no vote” process, where, you know, if I’m registered as “Brad Friedman” but my driver’s license says “Bradley Friedman,” I might be disallowed from voting. That’s the holdup down there. In either case, extending the voting hours each day to something like twelve hours is a very good idea. I give him credit for that. And, boy, I hope folks will take advantage of getting in there and casting their vote, come hell or high water.
AMY GOODMAN: This doesn’t bode well for Election Day. I mean, it does that he extended the time of the polling places, but this is still early voting. This is before November 4th.
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Yeah. And I’ll tell you, I’ve been calling this the November surprise for some time. I’m quite concerned that on Election Day, not only will the crowds be enormous, but that we are again going to see bottlenecks at that check-in procedure, where thousands, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of voters around the country, state to state, find that they are suddenly no longer on the voting rolls. And I’ve been speaking with people within the last week who are saying, “Hey, Brad, you were right. I didn’t bother to check my registration. I voted in the primary. And suddenly, I’m no longer on the rolls.” That’s going to be a bottleneck at the check-in.
Republicans are going to be challenging voters in state after state, again, making what is going to be an extraordinarily huge turnout even worse, by simply challenging people at the polls. That’s going to lead to even longer lines. And, of course, Election Day is a work day, so a lot of folks can’t afford to stand around for three, four, eight, ten hours to cast their vote. We’ve got to do something about this mess.
But I want people to hang in there, to fight for their vote, help other people vote. Bring chairs, bring water, bring food. Help your neighbors. This is a time for courage and for people to step forward and fight for that right to cast that vote that so many have fought and died for over decades in this country. This is what democracy is about. It’s not a spectator sport. It’s a participatory democracy. We’re going to have to get in there and fight for each and every one of our votes this year, I’m afraid.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Brad Friedman of bradblog.com. Harvey Wasserman, also with us in Ohio, a battleground state. Harvey Wasserman, in Pennsylvania, John Bonifaz and all the voting rights groups filed suit to ensure that there be paper ballots not just when all the polling booths in a polling place are shut down, but if even one is shut down, because, of course, it will mean much longer lines. What do you expect to come of this?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, it’s very important that we have paper ballots wherever possible. We want paper ballots available to people who show up and are confronted with a voting machine, an electronic voting machine, and would prefer to vote on a paper ballot. We’re also urging—here in Ohio, you can vote early and get a paper ballot. And we’re—as Brad has mentioned and my co-author Bob Fitrakis has often pointed out, it’s much better to vote on a paper ballot and to do it early.
There will be huge lines on Election Day, which is to the credit of the American people. But we expect, here in Ohio and in Pennsylvania, and especially in the key states, Florida, as well, that the Republicans will be in there challenging every voter, every little number in your Social Security number or your driver’s license, middle initials that show up on driver’s licenses but not on voter registration forms. These will all be at issue on Election Day. The Republicans have made it clear that they will challenge every vote that they possibly can and to introduce as much chaos as they possibly can into the election process.
We want people also, if you have a problem voting, to find a lawyer and give a sworn affidavit. I am a plaintiff in the King Lincoln Bronzeville civil rights suit. This suit has had an enormous impact. You know, Jennifer Brunner is getting a lot of justifiable credit here in Ohio for cleaning up the election process, but it’s been moved along by the fact that we’ve had a very effective federal lawsuit. Any discrepancies, any problems that people have voting, they should be accounted for with an affidavit, sworn testimony, so that these can be used in lawsuits in the post-election process.
AMY GOODMAN: Does that have to happen right at the point of voting? I mean, who is going to bring a lawyer to the polling place?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, that’s the point. We want lawyers at the polling places. We want—as Brad has pointed out and as Bob has pointed out, we want everything videoed, and we also want lawyers available, so that people can have guidance. A lot of people are not clear on what the process is, and a lot of people have been intimidated by the Republicans, both in 2004, we saw it in 2006. We’re certainly going to see it in 2008 at the voting stations. The only way the GOP is going to win this election is to intimidate voters and knock as many of them off the voter rolls as they possibly can.
Brad also mentioned, people who may think they are registered to vote may come in for a nasty surprise when they get to the polls, and the time to check that is now. If you think you’re registered to vote or if you know people who think they’re registered to vote, check with your board of election now and make sure that things are in order, because if you turn up on Election Day and have a problem, you’re going to be part of the problem and not part of the solution.
AMY GOODMAN: Brad.
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Yeah, if I could add, in Pennsylvania, I’m really troubled about what’s going on there, because, in fact, we saw during the primary elections where voting machines were simply breaking down all over the state. Now—and they use touch screens almost everywhere out there. Now, never mind, you know, the hacking, the error, the fact that they don’t count correctly. The fact is, when they don’t start up, voters can’t vote.
And incredibly, the Democratic Secretary of State out there decreed that, as you said, no paper ballots need to be given out unless every machine breaks down in a precinct. Harvey can tell you what happened in Ohio when just one machine broke down in many of those precincts in 2004. And the fact that the Democrats aren’t raising holy hell about it and that, in fact, John Bonifaz and the NAACP had to be the one to file suit there and say, “Oh, please, give us paper ballots if a majority of machines break down”—the fact is, the state law already allows paper ballots to be given out if just one machine breaks down.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, we don’t think—
BRAD FRIEDMAN: But I’m afraid they’re not even going to have enough paper ballots out there. And, you know, we have a history. We know what has happened in Pennsylvania and all of the other states. And I can’t understand why Democrats aren’t demanding that there be enough paper ballots in every polling place for every voter this year, because I guarantee we’re going to be running out of them real quick.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Brad is absolutely right. You know, and this term he used earlier, “recalibration,” when you hear the term “recalibration,” you have to think stolen election, because recalibration is a cover for re-rigging electronic voting machines. And we know that this went on in Ohio 2004. It’s how George Bush got his second term. And recalibration means, essentially, that they’re rigging up the voting machine’s memory cards and general mechanisms to allow the theft of an election.
It is absolutely absurd that the Democratic Party has not stepped forward and demanded universal paper ballots everywhere. It should not depend on the breakdown of a voting machine to have universal paper ballots. To her credit, Jennifer Brunner here in Ohio requested that, did her very best to get it. We think she has to fight far harder to get universal paper ballots everywhere, whether the voting machines break down or not. And that’s an issue that the Democratic Party and Barack Obama really needs to take up now. As he said, one week. We’re really down to the wire. There need to be paper ballots everywhere, or this election could go the way of 2000 and 2004.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, are you talking to them in the Democratic Party? Why do you think—Brad has raised this over and over in this interview, that he feels that the Democrats are not pursuing this half as strenuously as Republicans are pursuing their issues.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: We have—I have absolutely no idea why the Democratic Party has fallen down. They fell down in 2000. They fell down in 2004. And they’re now—and we are in danger here. People are getting a little comfortable with Barack Obama’s apparent lead in the polls. That could disappear with the pulling of a plug or the recalibration of a machine. This is a very serious situation. The only solution is hand-counted paper ballots, which are observed by the media and by both parties when they’re counted. And there’s no other way to guarantee a free and fair election.
AMY GOODMAN: Harvey Wasserman and Brad Friedman, we will leave it there for now, but, of course, we’ll continue to pursue this. In fact, Democracy Now! will be broadcasting live for five hours, beginning 7:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday night in a Democracy Now! election special for every television and radio station to take around the country. And on the morning after, we’ll be expanding our broadcast to two hours, beginning 8:00 Eastern Standard Time in the morning. And we will be talking with people all over the country election night, and we want people reporting in problems that they are having or actually successes they’ve had in voting. You can go to our website at democracynow.org, where we’ll also be video streaming the broadcast in the evening and the morning after. You can call your stations and ask them what time they’ll be broadcasting Democracy Now!
Harvey Wasserman, thanks so much for joining us—
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: —of freepress.org. And Brad Friedman of bradblog.com, thanks for joining us by the DN! video stream.
To watch or hear the original show, CLICK HERE
With the election less than a week away, the battle is on for voting rights. Early voters across the country are reporting long lines and problems with electronic voting machines. Republicans, meanwhile, continue to file lawsuits that could stop thousands from voting. We speak to Harvey Wasserman of Free Press and Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog. [includes rush transcript]
Guests:
Harvey Wasserman, Senior editor of the Ohio-based FreePress.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election and How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008.
Brad Friedman, independent journalist and commentator on election issues. He is the creator of The Brad Blog and has reported extensively on vote rigging.
Rush Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: The election is less than a week away. The battle is on for voting rights. Early voters across the country are reporting long lines and problems with electronic voting machines, including vote flipping.
Republicans, meanwhile, continue to file lawsuits that could stop thousands from voting because their registration information does not exactly match government databases. Legal rulings in Wisconsin, Nevada and Ohio have rejected these challenges, and the US Supreme Court also dismissed a case earlier this month relating to 200,000 new voters in the battleground state of Ohio. But last week, the White House got involved and asked the Department of Justice to investigate the integrity of these 200,000 new voter registration forms. Ohio Democratic leaders, as well as the ACLU, have sent letters to the Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, urging him not to intervene in the election dispute in Ohio.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, more than 11,000 voters in Denver have not received absentee ballots because of a mistake made by the company Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia was supposed to have delivered 21,000 ballots to a Denver mail processing facility on October 16, but the company only delivered about half the requested ballots.
I’m joined now by two guests who have been the watchdogs for voting rights. Harvey Wasserman is senior editor of the Ohio-based freepress.org, and he’s co-author of four books on voter rights. What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election and How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008 are among them. He joins me from Columbus, Ohio. We’re also joined via video stream from Los Angeles by independent journalist Brad Friedman. He’s the creator of “The Brad Blog” at bradblog.com and has reported extensively on vote rigging.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Harvey Wasserman, let’s begin with you. Talk about the latest around this issue of the 200,000 new voters’ new voter registration forms.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, the GOP is trying to disenfranchise these 200,000 people by challenging their right to vote, asking the Secretary of State here, Jennifer Brunner, to let the counties investigate and knock off the voter rolls, if they choose to, people who have minor discrepancies in their Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers. And the Secretary of State has rightfully showed that many of these mistakes come from typographical errors when the numbers are entered in at the agencies. And so, essentially, what the GOP is doing is asking to disenfranchise people because of a minor typographical error. We are supporting the Secretary of State in resisting this attempt.
The US Supreme Court has rejected this challenge to these 200,000 voters, but now the Bush administration has ordered or has asked the Attorney General, Mukasey, to get involved. This is reminiscent of the interjection in the 2006 election, when nine federal prosecutors were asked to get involved in alleged voter fraud, which turned out to be nonexistent.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain further what is happening around the White House urging Mukasey to get involved, the ACLU saying he shouldn’t get involved? And go back a little in time to, well, really why his predecessor, why the former Attorney General, Gonzales, actually was forced out of office, resigned.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes. Attorney General Gonzales was forced out of office because he ordered nine federal prosecutors, nine federal employees, to prosecute voter fraud that didn’t exist. The idea was, on the part of the Bush administration, to disenfranchise as many people as possible by federal means in the 2006 election. And essentially, this is a replay here.
In Ohio, 200,000 votes exceeds substantially Bush’s alleged margin of victory in 2004. It’s a lot of votes out of 5.4 million that voted in 2004. So this is a very substantial attack on the ability—this is all about new voters, by the way, who have filed new forms. And it’s a very strong attempt to discourage new voters from coming into the place of voting and to affect the election. 200,000 votes thrown off the voter rolls here would be a very substantial chunk and could actually affect the outcome of the election.
AMY GOODMAN: There was another very important ruling that Bill O’Reilly of Fox was extremely upset about, and it’s the ruling by a federal judge that counties must allow homeless voters to list park benches and other locations that aren’t buildings as addresses.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yeah, well, these people are still citizens. Many of them, in fact, are veterans. And it’s quite ironic that the great patriot Bill O’Reilly would want to disenfranchise veterans.
We are seeing this up and down the line here in Ohio. We had a sheriff in Greene County attempt to disenfranchise students, or at least make a move toward it. You know, there’s always a question whether a student votes at home or on campus, and in Greene County there are a number of colleges, and the sheriff there threatened 308 voters with prosecution based on where they registered to vote. He was forced to back off of that.
And we are having a pretty good counterattack by voting rights advocates in this state, unlike 2004, where the election was essentially stolen without people fighting for it. This time around, I think people are standing up, and it’s going to be, we hope, a very different outcome.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, who’s been challenged time and time again. Also, aren’t there a series of ads that the Republicans have begun running, many times a day, around the issue of voter fraud?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, this is a total red herring. The Cincinnati Enquirer, a conservative Republican paper in Cincinnati, has investigated prosecutions for voter fraud since the 1950s and found less than ten, a bare handful. It’s really a false issue. It is a felony to vote fraudulently, and people just don’t do it. I think the Times, the New York Times, has run a statistic of something like eighteen successful prosecutions of voting fraud throughout the United—voter fraud throughout the United States in the last four or five years. So, it’s really a nonexistent problem. But the Republicans have seized upon it in an attempt to essentially de-legitimize this election and to discourage people from voting. We’ve seen the whole flap with ACORN and other instances where the Republicans are charging that there are massive hordes of people coming in to vote fraudulently. This is just not happening.
But we see a concerted campaign here in Ohio by the Republicans to de-legitimize the Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who we feel has been relatively even-handed. She is not like J. Kenneth Blackwell was in 2004, the co-chair—Blackwell then was the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign running the election. This year, Jennifer Brunner is not the co-chair of the Obama campaign, and we feel that she’s had a pretty good even-handed impact on the election. In fact, she attempted here to provide paper ballots for all who wanted them, who came to the polls and did not want to vote on electronic voting machines. And the Republicans, who control the legislature and the purse strings, screamed that this would cost too much money and have not allowed that to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Harvey, you have written four books on the subject of the elections and votes being stolen. What do you expect in these next—I mean, the election is, well, within a week, less than a week away.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, we expect a mix. We think it’s going to be much, much better than it was in 2004. A study in 2004 showed it took black voters in the state nearly an hour to vote, as opposed to white voters getting in in fifteen minutes or less. We don’t expect that to be rerun. We do expect some problems. We know in 2004 there was a selective shortchanging of black precincts on voting machines. We don’t expect that to happen again.
We will have thousands of observers at the polls, and we are urging everyone who’s interested to come out and be an election observer, come to the polls with a camera and make sure that if people are coming out of the polls with complaints, that they are recorded. And we will have hearings after the election to swear people in with affidavits so they can be used in court cases. In general, we—that their testimony can.
We generally expect a much smoother process this year, we hope, but we are still subject to electronic voting machines. As many as half of the people who vote at the polls on Election Day may be voting on electronic voting machines. We’re already seeing vote flipping from electronic voting machines in other states, as we saw in Ohio in Youngstown and Columbus in 2004. In both cases, people pushed John Kerry, and George Bush lit up. Now we’re seeing people pushing Barack Obama, and John McCain lighting up. We hope that that doesn’t happen again, and we’re going to have to fight that, because it’s very difficult to correct that on Election Day.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, and when we come back, Harvey Wasserman will stay with us, and we’ll be joined by Brad Friedman of Brad Blog. We’ll find out about the Sequoia Voting in Colorado. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re looking at voting around the country. Yes, early voting, millions of people are doing it. Harvey Wasserman with us, senior editor at the Ohio-based freepress.org. His book, How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008, among four books he’s written on voting. Brad Friedman with us, independent journalist with “Brad Blog” at bradblog.com. He has reported extensively on issues of vote rigging.
Talk about Sequoia and Colorado. Welcome, Brad, to the video stream.
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Thank you, Amy. Great to be here.
Yeah, well, Sequoia is one of the big four voting machine companies. Of course, they have failed in state after state. Their most recent failure here—and it’s hard to keep up with them, when it comes to Sequoia—is the 11,000 ballots that they were—absentee ballots that they were supposed to print out and send. They didn’t. They lied about it. And hopefully, once they got caught, now they’ll hopefully be sending them out this week, and hopefully voters will be getting them.
But, to me, by far, the greater concern is these electronic touch-screen machines all over the country, which are beginning to fail in state after state. And officials are claiming it’s a recalibration issue; if they recalibrate the screen, that will take care of it. And I’ve got to say that advising anyone to touch these machines, to insert memory cartridges in them, which is needed for recalibration, while they’re programmed is absolutely insane. And the fact that the Democratic Party is doing little or nothing and allowing these machines to continue to be used, instead of pulling them and requiring folks to vote on paper ballots, is to their shame, and it’s somewhat maddening at this point this many years into this, knowing what we know about these systems.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us more about vote flipping and touch screens in West Virginia, what’s happening there with early voting.
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Sure. And it’s not just—it’s West Virginia, it’s Tennessee, it’s Texas, Missouri, Nevada. Generally, what seems to happen here is people go in and vote for a Democratic straight party ticket or for Barack Obama, and the vote flips to a Republican or some other candidate. We’ve got video of that at bradblog.com that folks can take a look at, see it for themselves. And we’ve actually got an election official showing a machine with one of these problems, showing—suggesting that it’s a calibration—a screen calibration issue, showing how when you vote for one candidate, it flips to another. And then he says, “Look, here we’re recalibrating it now so it will now work fine,” and we actually see that it still doesn’t work fine even after he’s recalibrated it. He tries to make a straight party vote, and it ends up selecting Ralph Nader for president.
These machines need to be pulled out, because even when they work, the problem is that there is absolutely no way to ever verify that any vote ever cast on a touch-screen machine like this has been recorded as per the voter’s intent. It’s strictly impossible, even with a so-called paper trial. And that Democrats aren’t raising holy hell about it is maddening, frustrating and, frankly, to their shame at this point, knowing what we know.
AMY GOODMAN: Brad, let’s turn to some of the problems that have been reported with the electronic voting machines, as you were pointing out. Virginia Methaney from Jackson County, West Virginia, was one of the first people to report a problem with vote flipping last week after her attempt to vote Democrat was flipped to Republican. Videothevote.org spoke to Virginia Methaney about her experience.
VIRGINIA METHANEY: When I pressed to enter my vote for the Democrat, the checkmark jumped to the one above, to the Republican. Well, I pressed the Democrat again, and it jumped up again. So I asked a poll worker. I said, “Well, why would this machine not allow me to vote for my candidate?” She said, “Well”—she said, “It’s got a sensitive screen.” She said, “You’re touching it too hard.” She said, “Just barely use the tip of your fingernail to touch it,” which I did. Then I went to the next candidate, it did the same thing. I voted for the Democrat, it jumped up to the Republican. Well, then she told me, she said, “Just keep pressing the one that you want to vote for, and it will finally take.” Well, I did, and it did stay there, but I proceeded to have problems through—all through the ballot.
After I had the problem voting, I filed a formal complaint with the Secretary of State’s office. And her deputy investigator called me to ask me what happened. I told him. He said, “Well, it sounded like the machines need to be recalibrated, that when they’re moved, sometimes it messes them up.”
AMY GOODMAN: Videothevote.org also spoke to Jackson County, West Virginia county clerk Jeff Waybright about the vote flips on the iVotronic machines.
JEFF WAYBRIGHT: If the poll worker got to a machine and it was out of calibration, this is what would happen. I’m going to touch Barack Obama there, but notice, it jumped clear down to Chuck Baldwin, because the machine is out of calibration. Now it sent me to a screen to vote a write-in ballot. When I hit Barack Obama—the machine is out of calibration—it did not jump up to the Republican candidate, it did not vote a straight Republican ticket, and it did—it jumped down to Chuck Baldwin.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Brad Friedman of “Brad Blog,” what should people do? I mean, we heard from Virginia in West Virginia, and she did file a complaint. How do you know when it takes or if it hasn’t taken? And this whole issue of a receipt for voting, like we get when you get money from an ATM, is there a receipt anywhere in the country?
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Well, and that tape, by the way, of West Virginia of Waybright, as that tape continues, he shows what happens after they recalibrate the system, and the problems still occur. So, to recalibrate in the middle of an election is insane. That’s the most vulnerable point for these systems, where you can insert malicious software and anything else.
As to receipts, no, you don’t get them. You shouldn’t get them, because the fact is, we don’t want people leaving the polls and being able to buy and sell, you know, their vote. That’s why it’s so important to have transparency, to get it right in the first place. And any so-called receipt should be a paper ballot, hand-marked, that we all can go in—every citizen in the country can go in and take a look at after the election and assure that it was in fact counted correctly as per the voter’s intent. That is strictly impossible with any direct-recording electronic—these are usually touch-screen voting machines. It is strictly impossible, no matter what it says on the screen, to know, in fact, that that vote was counted as per the voter’s intent. That’s why these machines are so damn dangerous.
And I was on the air last week in Reno, Nevada with Harry Reid, who actually came on the air and said, “Well, we’re lucky here in Nevada, because we have a paper trail for all of our votes.” Fact is, in Reno, Nevada, they use illegally certified touch-screen machines, yes, with a paper trail, but 100 percent unverifiable as far as whether they’re recording the voter’s intent.
So you’ve got to fight for a paper ballot, you’ve got to ask for one where you’re allowed to have one, and, yes, please, bring a video camera, videotape your vote, put it out there on the web, videothevote.org, end up on YouTube. This time we’ve got to make a lot of noise about what happens. I promise you, if this happens to Republicans, they’ll be making noise. I’m disappointed that the Democratic Party and Barack Obama is not making the noise that they should be and demanding that these machines be removed and voters given paper ballots.
AMY GOODMAN: Brad Friedman, in the case of this West Virginia voter, the woman who described what happened, she’s sitting there with the poll worker showing her what’s happening. So, I mean, this ends privacy in voting. You’ve got to bring in the poll worker and show them who you’re trying to vote for?
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Yeah, that’s—unfortunately, that’s what has to happen, because if you don’t, A, they can’t help you with these machines—they’re very complicated to use—and B, nobody’s going to believe you that this problem occurred in the first place. They probably won’t believe you, even if you do have a poll worker over there. That’s why we’re suggesting people bring their cell phone, their video camera—cell phone video cameras and videotape this experience that they have when a vote jumps from one candidate to another.
But yeah, these are the hoops that we’ve been forced to jump through in order to try to cast our vote, to try and get it counted and to try and get it counted accurately. And after all of these years of, you know, folks like Harvey and myself running around with our hair on fire trying to warn people about this, it’s disappointing, to say the least, to see this going on now in state after state after state. It’s not just West Virginia, I promise you that.
AMY GOODMAN: Again, Brad of “Brad Blog” is joining us by video stream from California. This issue of the emergency declared by Governor Crist in Florida and allowing the lines—allowing the polling places to be extended to twelve hours, Brad, can you talk about this, these extremely long lines in Florida for early voting?
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I can. And frankly, this is to Governor Charlie Crist, a Republican—it’s to his effort, especially in the midst of this all-out Republican war on democracy that we’re seeing all across the country. So I’m going to give Governor Crist credit there for trying to ease the lines. In fact, the Republican legislature had shortened the early voting hours some time ago. And they’re seeing all kinds of problems, all kinds of lines.
The bottlenecks, unfortunately, are tending to be at the registration check-in process. Once again, these computers that are used to check people in to register to vote, that seems to be the bottleneck, because, in fact, the state of Florida has moved to paper ballots. And I’ve seen some of these election registrars—supervisors of election down there in Florida ordering more optical scan machines into the polling places, when that’s not the holdup. The opscan process is done at the end of voting. The holdup is checking people in. The bottleneck is the computers, the voter registration computers.
And this comes back to some of the same draconian processes that, in fact, Charlie Crist did allow to be used, this “no match, no vote” process, where, you know, if I’m registered as “Brad Friedman” but my driver’s license says “Bradley Friedman,” I might be disallowed from voting. That’s the holdup down there. In either case, extending the voting hours each day to something like twelve hours is a very good idea. I give him credit for that. And, boy, I hope folks will take advantage of getting in there and casting their vote, come hell or high water.
AMY GOODMAN: This doesn’t bode well for Election Day. I mean, it does that he extended the time of the polling places, but this is still early voting. This is before November 4th.
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Yeah. And I’ll tell you, I’ve been calling this the November surprise for some time. I’m quite concerned that on Election Day, not only will the crowds be enormous, but that we are again going to see bottlenecks at that check-in procedure, where thousands, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of voters around the country, state to state, find that they are suddenly no longer on the voting rolls. And I’ve been speaking with people within the last week who are saying, “Hey, Brad, you were right. I didn’t bother to check my registration. I voted in the primary. And suddenly, I’m no longer on the rolls.” That’s going to be a bottleneck at the check-in.
Republicans are going to be challenging voters in state after state, again, making what is going to be an extraordinarily huge turnout even worse, by simply challenging people at the polls. That’s going to lead to even longer lines. And, of course, Election Day is a work day, so a lot of folks can’t afford to stand around for three, four, eight, ten hours to cast their vote. We’ve got to do something about this mess.
But I want people to hang in there, to fight for their vote, help other people vote. Bring chairs, bring water, bring food. Help your neighbors. This is a time for courage and for people to step forward and fight for that right to cast that vote that so many have fought and died for over decades in this country. This is what democracy is about. It’s not a spectator sport. It’s a participatory democracy. We’re going to have to get in there and fight for each and every one of our votes this year, I’m afraid.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Brad Friedman of bradblog.com. Harvey Wasserman, also with us in Ohio, a battleground state. Harvey Wasserman, in Pennsylvania, John Bonifaz and all the voting rights groups filed suit to ensure that there be paper ballots not just when all the polling booths in a polling place are shut down, but if even one is shut down, because, of course, it will mean much longer lines. What do you expect to come of this?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, it’s very important that we have paper ballots wherever possible. We want paper ballots available to people who show up and are confronted with a voting machine, an electronic voting machine, and would prefer to vote on a paper ballot. We’re also urging—here in Ohio, you can vote early and get a paper ballot. And we’re—as Brad has mentioned and my co-author Bob Fitrakis has often pointed out, it’s much better to vote on a paper ballot and to do it early.
There will be huge lines on Election Day, which is to the credit of the American people. But we expect, here in Ohio and in Pennsylvania, and especially in the key states, Florida, as well, that the Republicans will be in there challenging every voter, every little number in your Social Security number or your driver’s license, middle initials that show up on driver’s licenses but not on voter registration forms. These will all be at issue on Election Day. The Republicans have made it clear that they will challenge every vote that they possibly can and to introduce as much chaos as they possibly can into the election process.
We want people also, if you have a problem voting, to find a lawyer and give a sworn affidavit. I am a plaintiff in the King Lincoln Bronzeville civil rights suit. This suit has had an enormous impact. You know, Jennifer Brunner is getting a lot of justifiable credit here in Ohio for cleaning up the election process, but it’s been moved along by the fact that we’ve had a very effective federal lawsuit. Any discrepancies, any problems that people have voting, they should be accounted for with an affidavit, sworn testimony, so that these can be used in lawsuits in the post-election process.
AMY GOODMAN: Does that have to happen right at the point of voting? I mean, who is going to bring a lawyer to the polling place?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, that’s the point. We want lawyers at the polling places. We want—as Brad has pointed out and as Bob has pointed out, we want everything videoed, and we also want lawyers available, so that people can have guidance. A lot of people are not clear on what the process is, and a lot of people have been intimidated by the Republicans, both in 2004, we saw it in 2006. We’re certainly going to see it in 2008 at the voting stations. The only way the GOP is going to win this election is to intimidate voters and knock as many of them off the voter rolls as they possibly can.
Brad also mentioned, people who may think they are registered to vote may come in for a nasty surprise when they get to the polls, and the time to check that is now. If you think you’re registered to vote or if you know people who think they’re registered to vote, check with your board of election now and make sure that things are in order, because if you turn up on Election Day and have a problem, you’re going to be part of the problem and not part of the solution.
AMY GOODMAN: Brad.
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Yeah, if I could add, in Pennsylvania, I’m really troubled about what’s going on there, because, in fact, we saw during the primary elections where voting machines were simply breaking down all over the state. Now—and they use touch screens almost everywhere out there. Now, never mind, you know, the hacking, the error, the fact that they don’t count correctly. The fact is, when they don’t start up, voters can’t vote.
And incredibly, the Democratic Secretary of State out there decreed that, as you said, no paper ballots need to be given out unless every machine breaks down in a precinct. Harvey can tell you what happened in Ohio when just one machine broke down in many of those precincts in 2004. And the fact that the Democrats aren’t raising holy hell about it and that, in fact, John Bonifaz and the NAACP had to be the one to file suit there and say, “Oh, please, give us paper ballots if a majority of machines break down”—the fact is, the state law already allows paper ballots to be given out if just one machine breaks down.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, we don’t think—
BRAD FRIEDMAN: But I’m afraid they’re not even going to have enough paper ballots out there. And, you know, we have a history. We know what has happened in Pennsylvania and all of the other states. And I can’t understand why Democrats aren’t demanding that there be enough paper ballots in every polling place for every voter this year, because I guarantee we’re going to be running out of them real quick.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Brad is absolutely right. You know, and this term he used earlier, “recalibration,” when you hear the term “recalibration,” you have to think stolen election, because recalibration is a cover for re-rigging electronic voting machines. And we know that this went on in Ohio 2004. It’s how George Bush got his second term. And recalibration means, essentially, that they’re rigging up the voting machine’s memory cards and general mechanisms to allow the theft of an election.
It is absolutely absurd that the Democratic Party has not stepped forward and demanded universal paper ballots everywhere. It should not depend on the breakdown of a voting machine to have universal paper ballots. To her credit, Jennifer Brunner here in Ohio requested that, did her very best to get it. We think she has to fight far harder to get universal paper ballots everywhere, whether the voting machines break down or not. And that’s an issue that the Democratic Party and Barack Obama really needs to take up now. As he said, one week. We’re really down to the wire. There need to be paper ballots everywhere, or this election could go the way of 2000 and 2004.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, are you talking to them in the Democratic Party? Why do you think—Brad has raised this over and over in this interview, that he feels that the Democrats are not pursuing this half as strenuously as Republicans are pursuing their issues.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: We have—I have absolutely no idea why the Democratic Party has fallen down. They fell down in 2000. They fell down in 2004. And they’re now—and we are in danger here. People are getting a little comfortable with Barack Obama’s apparent lead in the polls. That could disappear with the pulling of a plug or the recalibration of a machine. This is a very serious situation. The only solution is hand-counted paper ballots, which are observed by the media and by both parties when they’re counted. And there’s no other way to guarantee a free and fair election.
AMY GOODMAN: Harvey Wasserman and Brad Friedman, we will leave it there for now, but, of course, we’ll continue to pursue this. In fact, Democracy Now! will be broadcasting live for five hours, beginning 7:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday night in a Democracy Now! election special for every television and radio station to take around the country. And on the morning after, we’ll be expanding our broadcast to two hours, beginning 8:00 Eastern Standard Time in the morning. And we will be talking with people all over the country election night, and we want people reporting in problems that they are having or actually successes they’ve had in voting. You can go to our website at democracynow.org, where we’ll also be video streaming the broadcast in the evening and the morning after. You can call your stations and ask them what time they’ll be broadcasting Democracy Now!
Harvey Wasserman, thanks so much for joining us—
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: —of freepress.org. And Brad Friedman of bradblog.com, thanks for joining us by the DN! video stream.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Department of Homeland Security is in charge of RNC POLICE STATE in St. Paul
That's right folks....the Dept of Homeland Security is in charge of what's happening in St. Paul...that's why journalists are being arrested and detained and folk are being beaten for simply exercising their constitutional rights.
Contact the senators and congresspeople on the Homeland Security Committees and see how much they care about your constitutional rights. You might be surprised at who is not providing oversight on the POLICE STATE that Homeland Security has enacted in our country....
Some of the staffers are sympathetic and in tune with what is c0nstitutional or not....others act like you have called in to report that your neighbor's dog is peeing in your vegetable garden,,,,goes to show why the Congress's approval rating is so low.
Want to see what the homeland security is up to? Check out democracynow.org, buzflash, huffington post....
Contact the senators and congresspeople on the Homeland Security Committees and see how much they care about your constitutional rights. You might be surprised at who is not providing oversight on the POLICE STATE that Homeland Security has enacted in our country....
Some of the staffers are sympathetic and in tune with what is c0nstitutional or not....others act like you have called in to report that your neighbor's dog is peeing in your vegetable garden,,,,goes to show why the Congress's approval rating is so low.
Want to see what the homeland security is up to? Check out democracynow.org, buzflash, huffington post....
Monday, September 01, 2008
Democracy Now calling on concerned citizens and jouirnalists
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
www.democracynow.org
September 1, 2008
Contact:
Dennis Moynihan
Mike Burke
ST. PAUL, MN—Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was unlawfully arrested in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota at approximately 5 p.m. local time. Police violently manhandled Goodman, yanking her arm, as they arrested her. Video of her arrest can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjyvkR0bGQ
Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.
Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.
Democracy Now! is calling on all journalists and concerned citizens to call the office of Mayor Chris Coleman and the Ramsey County Jail and demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar. These calls can be directed to: Chris Rider from Mayor Coleman’s office at 651-266-8535 and the Ramsey County Jail at 651-266-9350 (press extension 0).
Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the press and the First Amenmdent rights of these journalists.
During the demonstration in which they were arrested law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force. Several dozen others were also arrested during this action.
Amy Goodman is one of the most well-known and well-respected journalists in the United States. She has received journalism’s top honors for her reporting and has a distinguished reputation of bravery and courage. The arrest of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar is a transparent attempt to intimidate journalists from the nation’s leading independent news outlet.
Democracy Now! is a nationally-syndicated public TV and radio program that airs on over 700 radio and TV stations across the US and the globe.
Video of Amy Goodman’s Arrest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjyvkR0bGQ
Saturday, January 19, 2008
“Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill)”
What Corporate Media won't tell you Democracy Now will! Thie is from Friday's Democracy Now Broadcast.
JUAN GONZALEZ: As voters head to the polls in Nevada and South Carolina Saturday, the economy remains one of the top issues for voters across party lines. Today, we’re going to spend the rest of the hour examining the growing income gap in the United States.
Economic figures show that in 2005, the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the country’s population had nearly as much income as all 150 million Americans who make up the lower economic half of the country. Of each dollar people earned in 2005, the top ten percent got 48.5 cents, the highest percentage since 1929, just before the Great Depression.
AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston has been closely tracking the nation’s income gap in the pages of the New York Times. In 2004, he published the bestselling book Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else. David Cay has just published a new book. It’s called Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill). He joins us now from the PBS station WXXI in Rochester.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, David.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Thank you for having me, Amy and Juan.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain the wealth transfer.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I was struck, listening to the program from Kenya, where they talked about the president and his power to give money to people, give land, and that’s why many people identify with it. We have created in the United States, largely in the last thirty years, a whole series of programs—a few of them explicit, many of them deeply hidden—that take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class and upper middle class and funnel it to the wealthiest people in America. And among the biggest recipients of these subsidies are the wealthiest family America, the Waltons; George Steinbrenner; Donald Trump; a whole host of healthcare billionaires. And these are policies that either have not been reported on or the news reporting on them generally has not informed people about what they really are.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I was struck—you have numerous chapters in the book on the various aspects of this transfer, but I was especially struck by your material on the New York Yankees and Steinbrenner and Joyce Hogi, who you mention in the book, who I know well, and this whole issue of sports teams across America and how the public is subsidizing them. Could you elaborate on that part of it?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Sure. George Steinbrenner is getting over $600 million for the new Yankee Stadium in New York. The New York Mets are getting over $600 million. In fact, the City of New York gave them money to lobby against the taxpayers to get more money. Rudy Giuliani gave $50 million to the two teams for that purpose.
The new owners of the Washington Nationals baseball team in Washington, D.C., paid $450 million for the team. But, in fact, they got the team for free, because the subsidy they’re getting for the new stadium is worth $611 million. We actually paid these people to buy the team.
Now, in this country right now, we are spending $2 billion a year subsidizing the big four sports: baseball, basketball, football and hockey. It accounts for all of the profits of that industry and more. Now, there may be individual teams that make money, but the industry as a whole is not profitable. And that’s astonishing because the big four leagues are exempt from the laws of competition. By the way, irony is not dead, because here are people who are in the business of competition on the field who are exempted by law from the rules of economic competition.
If you go to England and you want to start a soccer team, they have to let you join the soccer league. There are thirteen commercial soccer teams in the London area. New York City, the biggest city in the country, there are two baseball teams, because there’s no free entry into the market. In Los Angeles, there’s no football team. And the owners use this power to prevent others from owning teams, to prevent municipal governments from owning teams, to prevent nonprofits from owning teams, to extract money from the taxpayers to build them new stadiums.
At the same time that we’re doing this, we are starving our public parks for money. And I show in Free Lunch how the rise of urban gangs and now suburban gangs is connected to this. We used to have all sorts of programs in this country after World War II for young men and young women on Saturdays and during the summer and school holidays, where even if you didn’t have any money—didn’t matter that your parents didn’t have any money, because—and I know this because I did it as a child—you could go to any one of a half-dozen different places, and there were organized activities to keep you out of trouble. After all, idle hands are the devil’s workshop is not exactly a radical new idea. Well, we’ve cut and cut and cut those programs to fund two different subsidies: one to sports teams’ owners, one that goes to Tyco, General Electric, Honeywell and some other big companies. And, lo and behold, we’ve had a big rise in urban violence because of the vacuum being filled by young people who no longer have these organized activities.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of sports teams, talk about President Bush and where you believe, really, ultimately, he got his wealth.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, it isn’t a function of belief, Amy. I’ve got the documents. President Bush, who will go down in history as the great tax cutter, owes almost all of his fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket. What happened is, an oil man named Eddie Chiles wanted to sell his money-losing Texas Rangers baseball team. They played in a little stadium, smaller than the one we have here in Rochester, New York, and of course couldn’t make any money. So George Bush put together a group of very wealthy investors to buy the team. He put up himself $600,000 of borrowed money. The partners then gave him a 10 percent stake as the managing partner. That’s a very common arrangement in business. Then they held a special election in January of the year in question to increase the sales tax in the town of Arlington, Texas, by one half-cent. That money was used to build a new baseball stadium. It’s an incredibly nice baseball stadium.
Then the power of government to seize land by eminent domain—and I go back to what was talked about in Kenya, the leader there can give you land, he can presumably therefore also take it away—the government used its power of eminent domain to seize land from people, not for a public purpose—not for a military base, for a school, for a highway, for a sewer plant—but because it was coveted by President Bush and his friends, and they were unwilling to go into the market and buy it through market economics. So the government seized this land. People were paid far less than they were owed, and we know that because one family fought back, and a jury, after being out just a matter of minutes, awarded them about six times what they had been offered by the government of Arlington.
The value of this subsidy, according to Ray Hutchison, who is the husband of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, is a prominent Republican insider in Texas and is the leading authority on municipal bond finance in Texas, was $202.5 million. The profit that President Bush and his partners made when they sold the team was $164 million. What does that tell you? Every single penny of additional money President Bush got from that investment, his gain, came from the taxpayers. He did not add one cent to the value of that team through his skill as an MBA manager. This gets repeated all over the country.
And then when President Bush filed his tax return, he should have reported that the 10 percent share he had, the one that was given to him as compensation for being general manager, was wage income. And, of course, we tax wages at a higher rate than we do capital income, like capital gains. President Bush therefore shorted the government $3.4 million. Under our system, you sign your tax return subject to audit. If you’re not audited and you don’t pay the government the right amount, if it’s too much, the government keeps it, if it’s too little, you short the government, but nothing happens to you.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. His new book is called Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). We’ll come back to David Cay Johnston in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, has written the book Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, David Cay Johnston, the American home subprime crisis has been much in the news and the enormous impact it’s having on the economy. You’ve got a few chapters here where you talk about the home and home robbery, and you even delve on an issue that very few people have ever talked about: title insurance companies and the enormous wealth transfer that have gone on there. Could you talk about that?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, sure. You know, when you buy a home—and I remember the first time I did it as a young man—you have this enormous sense of accomplishment, and you sit down in a room, and they throw all these papers at you—“Sign this, sign this, initial this page, OK, sign this.” So when you’re all done, you get a little sheet listing all the costs you have, and you get dinged for $15 here and $25 there. But there’s one big item called land title insurance. If you buy a $200,000 house, it will probably cost you close to $1,000. Well, it turns out that ninety cents out of every dollar you are forced to pay for this goes to pay commercial bribes. And this goes on all throughout the industry all across the United States, and nobody is prosecuted for it.
And here’s what happens. Well, you wrote the check for the $1,000, the land title insurance companies, who are insuring the risk that someone will come along and say, “That’s really my piece of land,” or “I have the right to put an oil well in your backyard. Here’s this document from 1848,” or your new outbuilding encroaches one inch onto the neighbor’s land, supposedly. That’s what you are insuring against. These companies’ real customers are the real-estate agent that you thought was representing you or the lawyer you paid to represent you or the mortgage broker who arranged to get you the mortgage, because they steer you to the title company. And in return, they get kickbacks.
The state insurance commissioners of California and Washington wrote very detailed reports about this, because one of the land title companies tried to spear the insurance commissioner of Colorado. And there’s emails and tape-recorded conversations about a very Machiavellian plot to use the news media to a plant a question that would smear this woman. And what did the insurance commissioners say should be done after they found that 90 percent of this money is paid in kickbacks? And by the way, one of the big title companies, in its report to shareholders, says that its customers aren’t you and me, when we buy a house; it says its customers are the bankers and the brokers and the lawyers. Well, the insurance commissioners said what we need is an education program. We need to make sure that the land title companies know that they can’t pay these kickbacks and referral fees, as they’re politely called. Well, if the education program worked, the cost of land title insurance would have dropped 90 percent. It hasn’t. So it’s another example of the kind of institutionalized corruption that I write about in Free Lunch that takes money from the many and concentrates it in the hands of the politically connected few.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about Barack Obama’s comments, David Cay Johnston, who praised—
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, one thing, Amy, I don’t do, Amy, I don’t talk about the presidential campaign, because—
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, you don’t have to—you don’t have to talk about them—
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: —but just the substance of what he had to say, which was very interesting, as he talked about former President Ronald Reagan. He was in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, appearing to express admiration for what he called Reagan’s “clarity” and “optimism” and overcoming “excesses” of the ’60s and ’70s. This is what he said.
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the ’60s and ’70s and, you know, government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. And I think people just tapped in—he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.
AMY GOODMAN: In response, rival candidate John Edwards said Reagan “did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day.” He said, “I can promise you [this: I will] never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change.” So, David Cay Johnston, without getting into presidential politics, you write extensively about Ronald Reagan in this book.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yes. Well, Ronald Reagan, whether you love Ronald Reagan or you hate Ronald Reagan, was a great leader. He did, in fact, dramatically change the country.
Between 1945 and the election of Ronald Reagan, we had a government that was focused on creating and nurturing the middle class. When I was a young man, I was able to go to college only because it was free. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have any money—my dad was a 100 percent disabled veteran, and I went to work when I was ten years old and full time since I was thirteen—because it was free.
Today, the cost of a college education, a state college education, is about $10,000 a year. The average income of the bottom half of taxpayers—that’s not families, that’s taxpayers—is about $15,000. Think you can go to college if two-thirds of your income would have to go to college? I don’t think so.
Well, Mr.—what Mr. Reagan did in 1980 was he asked a question that had a very powerful effect. He said, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” And Americans said no, they weren’t. And they elected him to office, and they set in motion a major change in government policy, a change that I think has been perverted. I do not believe Reagan intended all of the things that have been done since he started this happening.
But I’m asking the question in Free Lunch: Are you better off than you were in 1980? And on the surface, America is much better off. The country is more than twice as wealthy in real terms as it was in 1980. Per person, adjusted for inflation, the economy now puts out $1.70 for every dollar that it put out in 1980. Those are absolutely tremendous economic numbers.
So how come we’re not all really well-off? Why is it one-in-seven families has filed bankruptcy in the last twenty-five years? Why is it people are so mired in debt that television ads are just full of debt relief and take on more debt ads, sometimes at 99 percent interest? Why is it that so many people don’t have health insurance and so many people no longer have a retirement plan?
And by the way, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans, what I call the vast majority, is smaller today than it was in 1980. And since the year 2000, when we really got serious about this tax cut business, the average income of Americans every year—2001, ’02, ’03, ’04, ’05—has been smaller than it was in 2000. There have been some gains in 2004 and ’05, but they haven’t gotten up to equal 2000. And of those gains in the year 2000—it’s either ’05 over ’04 or ’04 over ’03—half went to people who make over a million dollars a year. What’s happened is—
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t that wealth transfer massively begin—I mean, accelerate with Reagan?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, yes. No, that’s—I’m sorry, that’s exactly my point, Amy, is that what happened is that we put in place all sorts of new programs, many of which were never written about in the news media, that got no attention whatsoever. We created healthcare billionaires while making healthcare unavailable to one-in-seven Americans. And we did this with government money. We allowed people to buy public assets for, in some cases, a fraction of a penny on the dollar and then poured government money into them.
And, you know, our national myth that Ronald Reagan ran for office on was that there were all these welfare queen Cadillacs—welfare queens driving Cadillacs out there. I think there was, in fact, one scam artist who went to prison. But what’s really going on is welfare at the top, and way beyond what’s been reported in the news media as corporate welfare. We have built into the scaffolding of the new economy rules that funnel money to the top.
And that this has happened really shouldn’t surprise us, because under our campaign finance system, which has gotten worse and worse and worse with campaign finance reform that hasn’t worked, politicians running for high office spend a great deal of their time talking not to you and me and school teachers and police officers and firefighters and factory workers, but to rich people and their paid representatives. And they hear about their concerns and what they say they need to make things fair.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You also delve into this whole phenomena across America of the big box stores, the Targets and the Wal-Marts and the Kmarts. And obviously they’ve—to some, they at least offer cheaper goods, cheaper consumer goods. Your analysis of their impact?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, first of all, they say they offer cheaper goods. I don’t accept that that’s necessarily true.
But here’s what happens. And this is a good example of where the news media hasn’t done a good job. I have tons of news clips that say, oh, this new shopping mall is coming or a new Wal-Mart or a new Cabela’s store, and thanks to tax increment financing, this store is going to be built. Well, what is tax increment financing? I’ll tell you what it is. You go to the store with your goods, you pay for it at Wal-Mart, and there’s a very good chance that that store has made a deal with the government that the sales taxes you are required to pay, that government requires you to pay, never go to the government. Instead, those sales taxes are kept by Wal-Mart and used to pay the cost of the store. And typically in those deals, the store is tax exempt, just like a church.
Now, there are two ways that it’s important to think about this. One is, that means your kid’s schools, your police department, your library, your parks are not getting that money. And you’ll notice we keep saying we’re starved for money. We’re twice as wealthy as we were in 1980, but we’ve got to close hospitals, and we’ve got to close schools, and we don’t have money for all sorts of things like after-school programs, even though we’re twice as wealthy. The second thing to think about is, imagine that you own Amy Goodman’s or Juan’s department store across the street. You suddenly have to compete with people whom the government is giving a huge leg up on. You think you would go broke after a while? Well, in fact, you will.
And I tell about a man named Jim Weaknecht who owned a little store in the Poconos of Pennsylvania. He sold fishing tackle, hunting gear, stuff like that. And the way he made his living in his little tiny store, enough that he was able to have his wife stay at home and raise their three kids full time, was by charging less than a company called Cabela’s. Well, then Cabela’s came to town. This little city of 4,000 people made a deal to give Cabela’s $36 million to build a store. That’s more than the city budget for that town for ten years. It’s $8,000 for every man, woman, and child in that town to have this store. And even though he charged lower prices, he was pretty quickly run out of business.
That’s not market capitalism, which is what Ronald Reagan said he was going to bring us. He said, you know, government’s the problem, we need markets as a solution. Well, that’s not the market. That’s corporate socialism. And what we’ve gotten is corporate socialism for the politically connected rich—not all the rich, the politically connected rich—and market capitalism for everybody else.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, many of those folks need lobbyists to be able to get these kinds of breaks from the government, and you talk about the explosion of lobbyists and their influence on government.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: There are twice as many registered lobbyists in Washington today as there were in 1980. If the lobbying community had grown in revenues since the ’70s at the same rate as the economy, there would be one-tenth as many lobbyists in Washington. And those people are not there doing the good of the public. You know, the Constitution’s Preamble talks about the—
JUAN GONZALEZ: They’re not just in Washington, right? They’re not just in Washington. They’re also at the state level.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: No, no, they’re in all the state capitals, they’re in city halls, they’re all over the country. The lobbying business is one of the fastest-growing businesses in America, because—you know why? It’s easier to mine gold from the government’s treasury than from the side of a mountain. Why wouldn’t you go do that if you could get the government to give you money? And Donald Trump—a tax that’s supposed to serve the poor, his company got $89 million for a tax designated for the poor. Somehow, Mr. Trump’s public image suggests to me that he does not think of himself as a poor person.
AMY GOODMAN: David Cay Johnston—we’ll leave it there—Free Lunch is his book, How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill), speaking to us from the PBS station WXXI in Rochester, New York.
JUAN GONZALEZ: As voters head to the polls in Nevada and South Carolina Saturday, the economy remains one of the top issues for voters across party lines. Today, we’re going to spend the rest of the hour examining the growing income gap in the United States.
Economic figures show that in 2005, the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the country’s population had nearly as much income as all 150 million Americans who make up the lower economic half of the country. Of each dollar people earned in 2005, the top ten percent got 48.5 cents, the highest percentage since 1929, just before the Great Depression.
AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston has been closely tracking the nation’s income gap in the pages of the New York Times. In 2004, he published the bestselling book Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else. David Cay has just published a new book. It’s called Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill). He joins us now from the PBS station WXXI in Rochester.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, David.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Thank you for having me, Amy and Juan.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain the wealth transfer.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I was struck, listening to the program from Kenya, where they talked about the president and his power to give money to people, give land, and that’s why many people identify with it. We have created in the United States, largely in the last thirty years, a whole series of programs—a few of them explicit, many of them deeply hidden—that take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class and upper middle class and funnel it to the wealthiest people in America. And among the biggest recipients of these subsidies are the wealthiest family America, the Waltons; George Steinbrenner; Donald Trump; a whole host of healthcare billionaires. And these are policies that either have not been reported on or the news reporting on them generally has not informed people about what they really are.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I was struck—you have numerous chapters in the book on the various aspects of this transfer, but I was especially struck by your material on the New York Yankees and Steinbrenner and Joyce Hogi, who you mention in the book, who I know well, and this whole issue of sports teams across America and how the public is subsidizing them. Could you elaborate on that part of it?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Sure. George Steinbrenner is getting over $600 million for the new Yankee Stadium in New York. The New York Mets are getting over $600 million. In fact, the City of New York gave them money to lobby against the taxpayers to get more money. Rudy Giuliani gave $50 million to the two teams for that purpose.
The new owners of the Washington Nationals baseball team in Washington, D.C., paid $450 million for the team. But, in fact, they got the team for free, because the subsidy they’re getting for the new stadium is worth $611 million. We actually paid these people to buy the team.
Now, in this country right now, we are spending $2 billion a year subsidizing the big four sports: baseball, basketball, football and hockey. It accounts for all of the profits of that industry and more. Now, there may be individual teams that make money, but the industry as a whole is not profitable. And that’s astonishing because the big four leagues are exempt from the laws of competition. By the way, irony is not dead, because here are people who are in the business of competition on the field who are exempted by law from the rules of economic competition.
If you go to England and you want to start a soccer team, they have to let you join the soccer league. There are thirteen commercial soccer teams in the London area. New York City, the biggest city in the country, there are two baseball teams, because there’s no free entry into the market. In Los Angeles, there’s no football team. And the owners use this power to prevent others from owning teams, to prevent municipal governments from owning teams, to prevent nonprofits from owning teams, to extract money from the taxpayers to build them new stadiums.
At the same time that we’re doing this, we are starving our public parks for money. And I show in Free Lunch how the rise of urban gangs and now suburban gangs is connected to this. We used to have all sorts of programs in this country after World War II for young men and young women on Saturdays and during the summer and school holidays, where even if you didn’t have any money—didn’t matter that your parents didn’t have any money, because—and I know this because I did it as a child—you could go to any one of a half-dozen different places, and there were organized activities to keep you out of trouble. After all, idle hands are the devil’s workshop is not exactly a radical new idea. Well, we’ve cut and cut and cut those programs to fund two different subsidies: one to sports teams’ owners, one that goes to Tyco, General Electric, Honeywell and some other big companies. And, lo and behold, we’ve had a big rise in urban violence because of the vacuum being filled by young people who no longer have these organized activities.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of sports teams, talk about President Bush and where you believe, really, ultimately, he got his wealth.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, it isn’t a function of belief, Amy. I’ve got the documents. President Bush, who will go down in history as the great tax cutter, owes almost all of his fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket. What happened is, an oil man named Eddie Chiles wanted to sell his money-losing Texas Rangers baseball team. They played in a little stadium, smaller than the one we have here in Rochester, New York, and of course couldn’t make any money. So George Bush put together a group of very wealthy investors to buy the team. He put up himself $600,000 of borrowed money. The partners then gave him a 10 percent stake as the managing partner. That’s a very common arrangement in business. Then they held a special election in January of the year in question to increase the sales tax in the town of Arlington, Texas, by one half-cent. That money was used to build a new baseball stadium. It’s an incredibly nice baseball stadium.
Then the power of government to seize land by eminent domain—and I go back to what was talked about in Kenya, the leader there can give you land, he can presumably therefore also take it away—the government used its power of eminent domain to seize land from people, not for a public purpose—not for a military base, for a school, for a highway, for a sewer plant—but because it was coveted by President Bush and his friends, and they were unwilling to go into the market and buy it through market economics. So the government seized this land. People were paid far less than they were owed, and we know that because one family fought back, and a jury, after being out just a matter of minutes, awarded them about six times what they had been offered by the government of Arlington.
The value of this subsidy, according to Ray Hutchison, who is the husband of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, is a prominent Republican insider in Texas and is the leading authority on municipal bond finance in Texas, was $202.5 million. The profit that President Bush and his partners made when they sold the team was $164 million. What does that tell you? Every single penny of additional money President Bush got from that investment, his gain, came from the taxpayers. He did not add one cent to the value of that team through his skill as an MBA manager. This gets repeated all over the country.
And then when President Bush filed his tax return, he should have reported that the 10 percent share he had, the one that was given to him as compensation for being general manager, was wage income. And, of course, we tax wages at a higher rate than we do capital income, like capital gains. President Bush therefore shorted the government $3.4 million. Under our system, you sign your tax return subject to audit. If you’re not audited and you don’t pay the government the right amount, if it’s too much, the government keeps it, if it’s too little, you short the government, but nothing happens to you.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. His new book is called Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). We’ll come back to David Cay Johnston in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, has written the book Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, David Cay Johnston, the American home subprime crisis has been much in the news and the enormous impact it’s having on the economy. You’ve got a few chapters here where you talk about the home and home robbery, and you even delve on an issue that very few people have ever talked about: title insurance companies and the enormous wealth transfer that have gone on there. Could you talk about that?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, sure. You know, when you buy a home—and I remember the first time I did it as a young man—you have this enormous sense of accomplishment, and you sit down in a room, and they throw all these papers at you—“Sign this, sign this, initial this page, OK, sign this.” So when you’re all done, you get a little sheet listing all the costs you have, and you get dinged for $15 here and $25 there. But there’s one big item called land title insurance. If you buy a $200,000 house, it will probably cost you close to $1,000. Well, it turns out that ninety cents out of every dollar you are forced to pay for this goes to pay commercial bribes. And this goes on all throughout the industry all across the United States, and nobody is prosecuted for it.
And here’s what happens. Well, you wrote the check for the $1,000, the land title insurance companies, who are insuring the risk that someone will come along and say, “That’s really my piece of land,” or “I have the right to put an oil well in your backyard. Here’s this document from 1848,” or your new outbuilding encroaches one inch onto the neighbor’s land, supposedly. That’s what you are insuring against. These companies’ real customers are the real-estate agent that you thought was representing you or the lawyer you paid to represent you or the mortgage broker who arranged to get you the mortgage, because they steer you to the title company. And in return, they get kickbacks.
The state insurance commissioners of California and Washington wrote very detailed reports about this, because one of the land title companies tried to spear the insurance commissioner of Colorado. And there’s emails and tape-recorded conversations about a very Machiavellian plot to use the news media to a plant a question that would smear this woman. And what did the insurance commissioners say should be done after they found that 90 percent of this money is paid in kickbacks? And by the way, one of the big title companies, in its report to shareholders, says that its customers aren’t you and me, when we buy a house; it says its customers are the bankers and the brokers and the lawyers. Well, the insurance commissioners said what we need is an education program. We need to make sure that the land title companies know that they can’t pay these kickbacks and referral fees, as they’re politely called. Well, if the education program worked, the cost of land title insurance would have dropped 90 percent. It hasn’t. So it’s another example of the kind of institutionalized corruption that I write about in Free Lunch that takes money from the many and concentrates it in the hands of the politically connected few.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about Barack Obama’s comments, David Cay Johnston, who praised—
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, one thing, Amy, I don’t do, Amy, I don’t talk about the presidential campaign, because—
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, you don’t have to—you don’t have to talk about them—
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: —but just the substance of what he had to say, which was very interesting, as he talked about former President Ronald Reagan. He was in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, appearing to express admiration for what he called Reagan’s “clarity” and “optimism” and overcoming “excesses” of the ’60s and ’70s. This is what he said.
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the ’60s and ’70s and, you know, government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. And I think people just tapped in—he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.
AMY GOODMAN: In response, rival candidate John Edwards said Reagan “did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day.” He said, “I can promise you [this: I will] never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change.” So, David Cay Johnston, without getting into presidential politics, you write extensively about Ronald Reagan in this book.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yes. Well, Ronald Reagan, whether you love Ronald Reagan or you hate Ronald Reagan, was a great leader. He did, in fact, dramatically change the country.
Between 1945 and the election of Ronald Reagan, we had a government that was focused on creating and nurturing the middle class. When I was a young man, I was able to go to college only because it was free. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have any money—my dad was a 100 percent disabled veteran, and I went to work when I was ten years old and full time since I was thirteen—because it was free.
Today, the cost of a college education, a state college education, is about $10,000 a year. The average income of the bottom half of taxpayers—that’s not families, that’s taxpayers—is about $15,000. Think you can go to college if two-thirds of your income would have to go to college? I don’t think so.
Well, Mr.—what Mr. Reagan did in 1980 was he asked a question that had a very powerful effect. He said, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” And Americans said no, they weren’t. And they elected him to office, and they set in motion a major change in government policy, a change that I think has been perverted. I do not believe Reagan intended all of the things that have been done since he started this happening.
But I’m asking the question in Free Lunch: Are you better off than you were in 1980? And on the surface, America is much better off. The country is more than twice as wealthy in real terms as it was in 1980. Per person, adjusted for inflation, the economy now puts out $1.70 for every dollar that it put out in 1980. Those are absolutely tremendous economic numbers.
So how come we’re not all really well-off? Why is it one-in-seven families has filed bankruptcy in the last twenty-five years? Why is it people are so mired in debt that television ads are just full of debt relief and take on more debt ads, sometimes at 99 percent interest? Why is it that so many people don’t have health insurance and so many people no longer have a retirement plan?
And by the way, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans, what I call the vast majority, is smaller today than it was in 1980. And since the year 2000, when we really got serious about this tax cut business, the average income of Americans every year—2001, ’02, ’03, ’04, ’05—has been smaller than it was in 2000. There have been some gains in 2004 and ’05, but they haven’t gotten up to equal 2000. And of those gains in the year 2000—it’s either ’05 over ’04 or ’04 over ’03—half went to people who make over a million dollars a year. What’s happened is—
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t that wealth transfer massively begin—I mean, accelerate with Reagan?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, yes. No, that’s—I’m sorry, that’s exactly my point, Amy, is that what happened is that we put in place all sorts of new programs, many of which were never written about in the news media, that got no attention whatsoever. We created healthcare billionaires while making healthcare unavailable to one-in-seven Americans. And we did this with government money. We allowed people to buy public assets for, in some cases, a fraction of a penny on the dollar and then poured government money into them.
And, you know, our national myth that Ronald Reagan ran for office on was that there were all these welfare queen Cadillacs—welfare queens driving Cadillacs out there. I think there was, in fact, one scam artist who went to prison. But what’s really going on is welfare at the top, and way beyond what’s been reported in the news media as corporate welfare. We have built into the scaffolding of the new economy rules that funnel money to the top.
And that this has happened really shouldn’t surprise us, because under our campaign finance system, which has gotten worse and worse and worse with campaign finance reform that hasn’t worked, politicians running for high office spend a great deal of their time talking not to you and me and school teachers and police officers and firefighters and factory workers, but to rich people and their paid representatives. And they hear about their concerns and what they say they need to make things fair.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You also delve into this whole phenomena across America of the big box stores, the Targets and the Wal-Marts and the Kmarts. And obviously they’ve—to some, they at least offer cheaper goods, cheaper consumer goods. Your analysis of their impact?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, first of all, they say they offer cheaper goods. I don’t accept that that’s necessarily true.
But here’s what happens. And this is a good example of where the news media hasn’t done a good job. I have tons of news clips that say, oh, this new shopping mall is coming or a new Wal-Mart or a new Cabela’s store, and thanks to tax increment financing, this store is going to be built. Well, what is tax increment financing? I’ll tell you what it is. You go to the store with your goods, you pay for it at Wal-Mart, and there’s a very good chance that that store has made a deal with the government that the sales taxes you are required to pay, that government requires you to pay, never go to the government. Instead, those sales taxes are kept by Wal-Mart and used to pay the cost of the store. And typically in those deals, the store is tax exempt, just like a church.
Now, there are two ways that it’s important to think about this. One is, that means your kid’s schools, your police department, your library, your parks are not getting that money. And you’ll notice we keep saying we’re starved for money. We’re twice as wealthy as we were in 1980, but we’ve got to close hospitals, and we’ve got to close schools, and we don’t have money for all sorts of things like after-school programs, even though we’re twice as wealthy. The second thing to think about is, imagine that you own Amy Goodman’s or Juan’s department store across the street. You suddenly have to compete with people whom the government is giving a huge leg up on. You think you would go broke after a while? Well, in fact, you will.
And I tell about a man named Jim Weaknecht who owned a little store in the Poconos of Pennsylvania. He sold fishing tackle, hunting gear, stuff like that. And the way he made his living in his little tiny store, enough that he was able to have his wife stay at home and raise their three kids full time, was by charging less than a company called Cabela’s. Well, then Cabela’s came to town. This little city of 4,000 people made a deal to give Cabela’s $36 million to build a store. That’s more than the city budget for that town for ten years. It’s $8,000 for every man, woman, and child in that town to have this store. And even though he charged lower prices, he was pretty quickly run out of business.
That’s not market capitalism, which is what Ronald Reagan said he was going to bring us. He said, you know, government’s the problem, we need markets as a solution. Well, that’s not the market. That’s corporate socialism. And what we’ve gotten is corporate socialism for the politically connected rich—not all the rich, the politically connected rich—and market capitalism for everybody else.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, many of those folks need lobbyists to be able to get these kinds of breaks from the government, and you talk about the explosion of lobbyists and their influence on government.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: There are twice as many registered lobbyists in Washington today as there were in 1980. If the lobbying community had grown in revenues since the ’70s at the same rate as the economy, there would be one-tenth as many lobbyists in Washington. And those people are not there doing the good of the public. You know, the Constitution’s Preamble talks about the—
JUAN GONZALEZ: They’re not just in Washington, right? They’re not just in Washington. They’re also at the state level.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: No, no, they’re in all the state capitals, they’re in city halls, they’re all over the country. The lobbying business is one of the fastest-growing businesses in America, because—you know why? It’s easier to mine gold from the government’s treasury than from the side of a mountain. Why wouldn’t you go do that if you could get the government to give you money? And Donald Trump—a tax that’s supposed to serve the poor, his company got $89 million for a tax designated for the poor. Somehow, Mr. Trump’s public image suggests to me that he does not think of himself as a poor person.
AMY GOODMAN: David Cay Johnston—we’ll leave it there—Free Lunch is his book, How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill), speaking to us from the PBS station WXXI in Rochester, New York.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Attorney General blocking Investigations
Michael Mukasey is just another Alberto Gonzalez, Mukasey behaves like he's the ANTI-Justice Attorney General. Another typical "protect me and my cronies" Bush selection that the Democratic majority Senate went along with. Shame on the Dems for this. No Attorney General would be an improvement over this.
Here’s the report from Democracy Now:
Mukasey Blocks Congressional Probe of Destroyed CIA Tapes
Attorney General Michael Mukasey is coming under intense criticism by Democrats for his handling of the scandal surrounding the CIA’s destruction of hundreds of hours of videotape showing interrogations inside secret CIA prisons. Within a single 24-hour period, the Justice Department warned a federal judge to back-off of his inquiry into the destruction of the tapes, told Congress to delay its own investigation into the matter, and refused to cooperate with congressional inquiries into the Justice Department’s role in the elimination of the tapes. The American Civil Liberties Union called the Justice Department’s actions a stunning rebuke of the constitutional system of checks and balances. (Headlines 12/17/07)
Sunday, November 18, 2007
See What Matters in the Corporate Media
If Couric and the other "pretty" newscasters would pay as much attention to research and context as they do to their hair and "cook factor" the Corporate News might become worth watching. But Corporate Media doesn't want Americans to really know what's going on....if we did we would not tolerate the government give aways to the Corporate media and their corporate crony advertisers....And the Corporate Media might have to start "paying" for their use of "our publicly owned airwaves" by giving candidates running for office free air time in blocks of 15 to 30 minutes which would eliminate the sound bites and the billions of dollars that the corporations obtain every election cycle.
In the meantime, watch a real journalist--Amy Goodman--at Democracynow.org and see what news can and should be.
Buzz...Buzz...
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Media Watch---Please FACT CHECK
When will the corporate media allow journalists and reporters to do their jobs? The job starts with FACT CHECKING....The Republicans are dispersing a bunch of talking points that are FALSE...and the corporate media is once again becoming a fascist neo-con propaganda machine...simply reporting false accusations.
1--The White House wants the Democratic Congress labeled a "do nothing" Congress....FALSE...it's the Republican party who are putting the brakes on legislative activities. IF Congress does pass a decent bill King George is threatening to VETO.
2--The White House is reporting PROGRESS with the Bush Surge. FALSE--Insurgent attacks are higher now than they were pre-surge...and the Iraqi government has not met a single bench mark. The White House desperately wants the American people to think progress is being made so they can continue this war. The White House is already acting like the September deadline means nothing....They want another "new" deadline set for Spring. Once again the same old spin just to keep this war going on and on and on....while the American people continue to die and go heavier and heavier into death. And for what? So George Bush and Dick Cheney can save face and continue to collect war time profits for themselves and their cronies?
3--The White House is still itching to attack Iran so they continue to state that Iran is "meddling" in Iraq's affairs. This is partially true. However, they do not mention that the BIGGEST MEDDLER are Bush and Cheney's favorite Middle East nation--Saudi Arabia. The Saudi's are increasing their support (with manpower and material support) of the Sunni's....the very insurgents attacking our troops on a daily basis. In addition, the Bush White House has just discovered a Saudi bank and a Saudi family financing Al Qaeda...and they have decided to do nothing about it. Yet with the latest Bush executive order they will immediately confiscate an American citizen's property and cash assets if Bush thinks they are subverting the Iraqi war effort. And now Bush and Cheney want to sell the Saudi's more military hardware....military hardware that "could" make it's way into Iraq and be used against our troops. Heckuva job Bushie.
The corporate media has shown that all it will do is spread propaganda. The corporate media helped us get into this war with propaganda and they are going to continue the propaganda to keep us in this war....
So American's need to continue to shout out to the Congress to SUPPORT OUR TROOPS AND STOP THE WAR NOW!!
When you want factual news check out democracynow.org where you can access the daily report via video, audio, or transcripts. And of course, continue to check out "reputable blogs." Beware that the neo-cons have recently begun an onslaught into the blogosphere and are now supplying talking points to various right wing blogs.....They continue to believe the endless repetition will once again sell falsehoods as truth to the American people.
Please don't drink the Kool Aid folks. Remember that recent history shows that if the White House is making a statement it is probably false......don't believe anything unless you fact check it yourself.
Buzz...Buzz...
1--The White House wants the Democratic Congress labeled a "do nothing" Congress....FALSE...it's the Republican party who are putting the brakes on legislative activities. IF Congress does pass a decent bill King George is threatening to VETO.
2--The White House is reporting PROGRESS with the Bush Surge. FALSE--Insurgent attacks are higher now than they were pre-surge...and the Iraqi government has not met a single bench mark. The White House desperately wants the American people to think progress is being made so they can continue this war. The White House is already acting like the September deadline means nothing....They want another "new" deadline set for Spring. Once again the same old spin just to keep this war going on and on and on....while the American people continue to die and go heavier and heavier into death. And for what? So George Bush and Dick Cheney can save face and continue to collect war time profits for themselves and their cronies?
3--The White House is still itching to attack Iran so they continue to state that Iran is "meddling" in Iraq's affairs. This is partially true. However, they do not mention that the BIGGEST MEDDLER are Bush and Cheney's favorite Middle East nation--Saudi Arabia. The Saudi's are increasing their support (with manpower and material support) of the Sunni's....the very insurgents attacking our troops on a daily basis. In addition, the Bush White House has just discovered a Saudi bank and a Saudi family financing Al Qaeda...and they have decided to do nothing about it. Yet with the latest Bush executive order they will immediately confiscate an American citizen's property and cash assets if Bush thinks they are subverting the Iraqi war effort. And now Bush and Cheney want to sell the Saudi's more military hardware....military hardware that "could" make it's way into Iraq and be used against our troops. Heckuva job Bushie.
The corporate media has shown that all it will do is spread propaganda. The corporate media helped us get into this war with propaganda and they are going to continue the propaganda to keep us in this war....
So American's need to continue to shout out to the Congress to SUPPORT OUR TROOPS AND STOP THE WAR NOW!!
When you want factual news check out democracynow.org where you can access the daily report via video, audio, or transcripts. And of course, continue to check out "reputable blogs." Beware that the neo-cons have recently begun an onslaught into the blogosphere and are now supplying talking points to various right wing blogs.....They continue to believe the endless repetition will once again sell falsehoods as truth to the American people.
Please don't drink the Kool Aid folks. Remember that recent history shows that if the White House is making a statement it is probably false......don't believe anything unless you fact check it yourself.
Buzz...Buzz...
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Did Sunday's Corporate Media....
If you are still watching the same pundits " who get it wrong but keep mouthing the corporate propaganda"....answer me this....Did anyone come as close to speaking the truth today as this stand up comic?
It's a sad day for journalism and the "free press" when the comediennes do a better job of reporting than the "corporate pundits....." Maybe if folks stop watching the propaganda pundits the corporate media (anxious to keep advertisers might actually hire some genuine, competent journalists to start giving us some accurate news reports for a change.
In the meantime, I suggest you watch independent journalists such as Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. You might also subscribe to DISH network ( NOT Rupert Murdoch's satellite company) where you will get access to two channels on the basic program...FSTV and LINKTV which has a number of sound news programs and good commentaries and documentaries. Democracy Now is available on the web as are some of the programs at FSTV and LINKTV.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Media Watch--WAVY TV 10 ignores the "Static"
Amy and David Goodman appeared on the Washington Journal (Cspan) today discussing their new bestseller, “Static,” and answering questions called in from viewers. Amy Goodman is the award winning journalist working with Democracy Now. Amy Goodman said, “We need media that covers the movements that create static in our society.” I agree with her; the discussions important to a democracy can occur when media covers the “static.”
Media should not be silent on the important issues and important questions of the day. Media should go where the silence is. Independent media is crucial for any democracy. How can citizens "rule" if they don't have the information they need to make informed decisions?
In this spirit of media I must express my “disdain” for Wavy TV 10 news who has repeatedly failed to cover recent demonstrations and street theatre occurring in Hampton Roads (even when they are “there.”) I watched Wavy TV 10 parked their satellite truck in a parking lot across the street from a local demonstration outside the gates of the Norfolk Naval Base but did not attempt to talk or “cover” the demonstration.
On Wednesday night I watched Wavy TV 10 drive by the Naro Theatre as local residents honored the Iraqi children killed a memorial of candles and children’s shoes bearing the names of children killed. There were readings of the names and singing to honor these victims of
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Samidoun in Norfolk
The producers, two award winning independent reporters--Ana Nogueira and Andrew Stern-- were in attendance. They shared their experiences and told us of their journeys obtaining the images and sound to create Samidoun--a multimedia presentation of the reality of war in
We learned details, new facts and information from legitimate, independent war reporters. "Hezbollah/hizbollah have no preferred English spelling of their name. The English words are simply a phonetic translation of Arabic. Hezbollah's television station is named Al-Manur. Al-Manur is the Arabic word for light house. Many Lebanese believe the British targeted the Lebanese lighthouse (which are historic and valued in Lebanon) as a symbol of Hezbollah. Stern and Nogueira shared a story of how they learned about drones. Drones make a whizzing, almost a buzzing, sound. They were walking around a Lebanese town when this whizzing buzzing noise started. Their Lebanese guide ran for cover under an awning and frantically waved and yelled for them to take cover. A drone was in the area. Israel used the drones to launch their bombing attacks. If civilians did not take cover in time to hide from the drones they would die in a bombing attack. Even in their homes people would freeze and stop all physical movements when drones came whizzing and buzzing so as not to set off an attack.
Nogueira and Stern remained on site for many hours to obtain their stories. After one Israeli bomb attack the Corporate Media showed up for their superficial "tour" and then left to dispatch their stories. During their tour the bodies of five Lebanese civilian had been recovered. Which is why the Corporate Media reported that five Lebanese civilians were killed and Democracy Now reported the true civilian death figure as 20. Nogueira remained on site until the last body was pulled from the wreckage in the evening hours.
Did you know that only four countries in the world label Hezbollah a terrorist organization? Acording to Stern and Nogueira the four countries are the U.S., Israel, Jordan, and the Netherlands. After some online research it looks like the number could be high as 9 IF all the countries listed online actually do define Hezbollah this way (U.S., Israel, Jordan, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Italy and Poland). Wikipedia states that six countries label Hezbellah as terrorists. ( U.S., Israel, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands.) The American Spectator reports that the Netherlands, Italy and Poland are the only Eurpoean countries defining Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Another online source states that Great Britain does not identify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, only an "arm" of Hezbollah is identified as terrorist. Their is no consensus online of how many or which countries actually identify Hezbollah as terrorist organization. (Of course, no one disputes that the U.S. and Israel define Hezbollah as terrorists.)The work of Ana Nogueira and Andrew Stern exemplifies what independent media strives to create. It is in-depth, investigative reporting that presents the reality surrounding the reporters and sparks a discussion of the situation. In reality there is no one truth, no one party line that everyone adheres to. Only in "propaganda" is news distorted an presented this way.
Samidoun is the polar opposite of the propaganda that corporate media produces and packages as news in the
Ana Nogueira worked as a producer at DemocracyNow. She is now an independent reporter and continues to work on assignment for Democracy Now. A sample of her recent reporting in
Andrew Stern is a photographer and author whose work focuses on social and political issues around the world. For additional information and to view Andrew's work visit andrewstern.net
Friday, December 01, 2006
Hampton Roads Peace Celebration
Primary event location:
The Studio for the Healing Arts
1611 Colley Ave., 2nd floor (one block north of the Naro)
Friday, December 1, 3-10 p.m.
Saturday, December 2, 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.,
Sacred Heart Catholic Church on Princess Anne and Blow Streets in Ghent
Coffee, chocolate, hand-made crafts, and other goods from both local artists and fairly paid artists and farmers from around the world. Music, poetry, theater, and spoken word! Shop for change this season!
Sunday, December 3, 1-4 p.m. :
Seminar at the Studio for the Healing Arts
Admission: Please bring a food donation to serve the homeless: pasta, canned goods, flour, etc.
Moderator: Susan Posey
* Community Supported Agriculture * Farmers Market * Becoming a Fair Trade town * Buying Fair all year round * Introduction to the Hampton Roads Fair Database
Wednesday, December 6, 7:15 p.m
Seminar at the Studio for the Healing Arts
Admission $10
Fire and Light, and Off-Road Search for the Spirit of God
Saturday, December 9, 8-11p.m.
Free and open to the public
Faciliator: John Robertson, author of Fire and Light
“In FIRE AND LIGHT, Jon Robertson searches for evidence of a unifying spiritual intelligence among the world's religious texts, scientific theories, and spiritual philosophies. This off-road quest leads him through the Bible, the Qu'ran, and the Bhagavad Gita to psychotherapists, mystics, and even a retired sailor from Southern California. At the end of his pursuit, Robertson discovers a powerful and loving force accessible to everyone on the planet.”
Bring a dish to pass
Wednesday, December 13, 5:30 p.m. in front of The Naro Cinema
Organizer: Carol Manuel
A silent visual tribute to the thousands of children who have been casualties of the invasion and occupation of Iraq will be held in front of the Naro Theater on Colley Avenue. Children's shoes bearing the names, ages, date of death, and the circumstances of the death will be laid out in tribute to the innocent lives that have been snuffed out as a result of war and violence since 2003. A brief reading of names and candle lighting will take place at the opening of the display. You are invited to participate in this memorial to the Iraqi children
Wednesday, December 13, 7:15 p.m., at the Naro
The feature film Iraq in Fragments will be the opening film of the Light in the Dark Film Festival at the Naro. Filmed in cinema-verite style, director James Longley's poetically rendered documentary looks at contemporary Iraq through the eyes of Sunnis, Shites, and Kurds. Stories include a fatherless 11-year-old apprenticed to the cruel owner of a Baghdad garage; Sadr followers in two Shiite cities rallying for regional elections while enforcing Islamic law at the point of a gun; and a family of Kurdish farmers welcoming the U.S. presence, which has allowed them a measure of freedom previously denied. Winner of three Documentary awards at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival: Best Director, Cinematography, and Editing (94 minutes)
Introducing the film, and the situation in Iraq concerning the targeting of teachers will be former liaison officer for Doctors Without Borders, Nabil Al-Tikriti:
Nabil Al-Tikriti (naltikri@umw.edu) received his Ph.D. in Ottoman and Islamic History from the University of Chicago in 2004 and joined the University of Mary Washington faculty the same year. Concurrent with his academic career Prof. Al-Tikriti has spent several years working in international emergency relief and election monitoring in several countries in the Middle East, Balkans,and Africa. His scholarly interests include Ottoman History, Modern Iraq, and Human Rights
Friday, December 15, 8-10 p.m.: Studio
$10 (space is limited so come early)
Location: Studio for the Healing Arts
The Dances of Universal Peace are simple, meditative, joyous, multi-cultural circle dances that use sacred phrases, chants, music and movements evocative of the worlds many sacred traditions.
Offered as "body prayer" in a spirit of sacredness, the dances promote peace and create an integrated experience of body, mind and spirit, helping dancers to gain direct experience of the unity of all.
No experience is necessary - the dances are simple and are taught each time by a trained facilitator.
Saturday, December 16, 1-4p.m.
Location: Studio for the Healing Arts
Organizers: Sonia Monson and Dani Vedros
Please join us for an afternoon of art, music and fun for the entire family. Kids 18 and under are welcome to submit art work in any medium for display at the Art Fest. Performance art, spoken word, poetry or musical performances are also welcome. This is a non-competitive and inclusive event where the joy of giving and receiving our unique gift is embraced and celebrated. The theme for this year is “Creating Peace: Within Ourselves, our Community and our World”. This event is part of the Light in the Dark Peace Festival.
You can submit art ahead of time at The Studio for the Healing Arts at 1611_D Colley Ave or bring it with you the day of the event.
Sunday, December 17, 1-4 p.m.
Location: Studio for the Healing Arts
Free and open to the public
Facilitators: Tom Ellis, Mac McKinney
Join us for the premiere of a biweekly, ecumenical sangha (community of practice) dedicated to exploring the universal Dharma set forth by all the great sages of the past, as applied to the political and ecological crises of the day by such Satyagrahis as Gandhi, King, Mandela, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Wangari Maathai.
Tuesday, December 19, 6 p.m. "Invisible Children"
Discussion Facilitator: Duke White
No admission charge for this film. Donations will be collected.
INVISIBLE CHILDREN The filmmaking adventure of three young Americans who have traveled to Africa is transformed into much more when they find themselves stranded in Northern Uganda. What they discover is a tragedy of huge proportions-a true story in which children are both the weapons and the victims, being abducted from their homes and forced to fight as child soldiers. With coverage on Oprah, CNN, and the National Geographic Channel, this film has taken on a life of its own, empowering youth across the world to change culture, policy, and lives. (60 mins)
Tuesday, December 19, 7:30 p.m."Dorothy Day: Don't Call Me a Saint"
Discussion Facilitators: Steve and Kim Baggerly from Catholic Worker House
DOROTHY DAY: DON'T CALL ME A SAINT: Few people have had as lasting an effect on the world as Dorothy Day, who was born in 1897 and was a noted journalist and social activist who was arrested for participating in various social protests. How is it that Day (who died in 1980) now finds herself on the path to sainthood, already bestowed by the Vatican with the title "Servant of God"? In 1933 she co-founded the left-leaning Catholic Worker newspaper. The subsequent movement spawned by this publication became one of the leading proponents for social and economic justice for the poor. Directed by photographer Claudia Larson. (60 mins)
Wednesday, December 20, 7:30-9:30 p.m.
Location: The Studio for the Healing Arts
Moderators: Junaid S. Ahmad and Rev. Paul Boothby
The role of the state and media corporations to spread a message of fear and retribution has been well documented. But how are religious values and ethics compromised by Christian, Judaic and Islamic institutions in order to align with the militant goals and human rights abuses of the nation state? Film clips from such new movies as Jesus Camp and Passionate Voices will be shown with discussion led by expert facilitators.
Junaid S. Ahmad is a J.D. candidate in law at the College of William and
Mary, Williamsburg, VA.
Rev. Paul Boothby is Minister of the Unitarian Church in Norfolk.
Friday, December 22, 5 p.m.
Begins at Bella Yoga on Colley Ave.
Sponsored by: Tapestry Inc.
Opening circle with prayer, song and setting of intention at Bella Yoga
Please join us for an evening of reflection and communion as we use walking meditation to unite as a community with an intention of universal peace. We will walk silently through the streets of Ghent aligning our hearts with a common wish for peace and then we will celebrate the solstice with an open house at the Blair Building.
Friday, December 22: , 7-10 p.m.,
Location: Studio for the Healing Arts, $10.00 (space limited, come early.)
Please join us for one of the final events in the Light in the Dark: Festival for Peace, an evening of dance, drumming, meditation and ritual in celebration and invocation of peace and compassion within ourselves, our community and our world.
Facilitators: Dani Vedros, Elizabeth Gay, Alexandra Kedrock and the Drum Group Beleza
For more Information: http://www.studioforthehealingarts.org/ or e-mail dvedros@cox.net
Friday, December 27, 9p.m.
Location: Special showing at The Boot, 123 21st Street in Ghent
Seminar
Wednesday, January 3, 2007, 7p.m.:
Location: The Studio for the Healing Arts
Moderated by Dr. Avi Santo, Assistant Professor of Communications at Old Dominion University
This new seminar uses selected clips from Israeli films spanning nearly sixty years to engage an audience in a conversation about how peace and conflict have been represented on the silver screen and what these shifting images suggest about real ongoing strategies for peace in the Middle East.
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Film dates and show times. See below for full film synopsis.
Naro Expanded Cinema
1507 Colley Ave. in Ghent
Wed, Dec 13
IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS 7:15
Thurs, Dec 14
WORDS OF MY PERFECT TEACHER 7:15
Friday, Dec 15
SHUT UP AND SING 7;15
U.S. versus JOHN LENNON 9:15
Sat, Dec 16
SHUT UP AND SING 2:30
U.S. versus JOHN LENNON 4:15
INTO GREAT SILENCE 6:15
SHUT UP AND SING 9:15
Sun, Dec 17
INTO GREAT SILENCE 2:30
SHUT UP AND SING 6:00
U.S. versus JOHN LENNON 7:45
Mon, Dec 18
AT THE GREEN LINE
plus short TALKING PEACE 8:00
Tues, Dec 19
INVISIBLE CHILDREN 6:00
DOROTHY DAY: Don't Call Me a Saint 7:30
SHUT UP AND SING 9:15
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INTO GREAT SILENCE The unlikely European arthouse hit arrives in America! What would it be like to renounce the modern world and live a communal cloistered life? After years of asking for permission, filmmaker Philip Groening was finally granted the opportunity to live with the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, a monastery in the French Alps, and film their simple daily lives. We find that all of their rituals of prayer, work, meals and meditative walks are imbued with the spirituality of the present moment. Large portions of the narrative are entirely silent, and the gorgeous visuals within this unique film transform the cinema into a great monastery where we're granted a palpable experience of the contemplative life. (160 mins)
IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS Filmed in cinema-vérité style, director James Longley's poetically rendered documentary looks at contemporary Iraq through the eyes of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Stories include a fatherless 11-year-old apprenticed to the cruel owner of a Baghdad garage; Sadr followers in two Shiite cities rallying for regional elections while enforcing Islamic law at the point of a gun; and a family of Kurdish farmers welcoming the U.S. presence, which has allowed them a measure of freedom previously denied. Winner of three Documentary awards at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival: Best Director, Cinematography, and Editing. (94 mins)
SHUT UP AND SING The Dixie Chicks were at the height of their popularity as the national-anthem-singing darlings of country music and top-selling female recording artists of all time when they made their now infamous anti-Bush comment in 2003. The film follows the lives and careers of the three women over a period of three years, during which they were under political attack and received death threats while continuing to live their lives, have children, and of course make music. The film ultimately presents who the Dixie Chicks are as women, public figures, and musicians. (93 mins )
WORDS OF MY PERFECT TEACHER The renowned Bhutanese Buddhist "king", scholar, filmmaker (The Cup, Travellers and Magicians), avid soccer fan, and world teacher Dzongsar Kyentse Rinpoche is the subject of this terrific new documentary. Filmmaker Lesley Ann Patten breathlessly chases Kyentse around the world-the UK, Bhutan, Canada, the U.S., and the World Cup playoffs in Germany-in what becomes her own spiritual quest. This is a rare opportunity to spend time with a Buddhist Master who says it's time for his students to "wake up" and has no qualms about revealing secrets that many have spent lifetimes searching for. And he does so with a perfect command of English! The film is set to a world beat that includes music by Sting. (100 mins)
INVISIBLE CHILDREN The filmmaking adventure of three young Americans who have traveled to Africa is transformed into much more when they find themselves stranded in Northern Uganda. What they discover is a tragedy of huge proportions-a true story in which children are both the weapons and the victims, being abducted from their homes and forced to fight as child soldiers. With coverage on Oprah, CNN, and the National Geographic Channel, this film has taken on a life of its own, empowering youth across the world to change culture, policy, and lives. (60 mins)
No admission charge-donations to be collected.
DOROTHY DAY: DON'T CALL ME A SAINT Few people have had as lasting an effect on the world as Dorothy Day, who was born in 1897 and was a noted journalist and social activist who was arrested for participating in various social protests. How is it that Day (who died in 1980) now finds herself on the path to sainthood, already bestowed by the Vatican with the title "Servant of God"? In 1933 she co-founded the left-leaning Catholic Worker newspaper. The subsequent movement spawned by this publication became one of the leading proponents for social and economic justice for the poor. Directed by photographer Claudia Larson. (60 mins)
Norfolk Catholic Workers Steve Baggarly and Kim Williams will facilitate a post-film discussion.
TALKING PEACE Jews and Palestinians come together in the suburban home of a San Diego couple to share their stories and their pain. This intimate film documents what happens when a human face is put on those considered to be the enemy: a foundation of trust that can grow. (30 mins) Plus 2nd feature....
AT THE GREEN LINE Military service in Israel is mandatory, and the act of refusal is considered treason. Regardless, a "Courage to Refuse" movement has been growing steadily among high-ranking soldiers and officers. This powerful film takes the viewer to the front lines of the conflict with Army reservists who patrol the occupied territories and interact with Palestinians. Through interviews they reveal their struggle to reconcile individual conscience with responsibility to, and love for, one's country. (60 mins)
I KNOW I'M NOT ALONE Armed with an acoustic guitar and a video camera, musician Michael Franti takes us on a musical journey through war and occupation in Iraq, Israel, and Palestine. Along the way he shares his music with everyday people who in turn reveal the often overlooked human cost of war. (90 mins)
U.S. VERSUS JOHN LENNON Lennon's transformation from Beatles rock star to anti-war activist to iconic inspiration for peace is documented by biographers David Leaf and John Scheinfeld. They reveal the U.S. government's attempt to silence Lennon, showing that this was not just an isolated episode in history but that the issues and struggles of that era remain relevant today. (PG13, 99mins)
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Bush's New Plan...A new version of stay the course.
With pressure from the American people, a new Democratic Congress, and the upcoming report from Bush's Iraq Task Force Bush is responding with a preemptive strike--a new version of “stay the course.”
Bush’s New Plan has the following goals: keep the troops in Iraq stationed at permanent bases, reduce American casualties, and reduce Iran’s influence. This is NOT the plan of the American people who voted loud and clear that they want the troops out of Iraq asap.
John McCain is an ally of the so called “new” Bush Plan. It’s not difficult to assume that Robert Gates is on board with this new plan also. Why else would Bush move so quickly to put his Rumsfeld replacement before a Congress that remains Republican controlled for a very short time. Bush had to move quickly to get “his” new “Rumsfeld” on board.
Bush plans to negotiate a ceasefire with the insurgent Sunni’s and then create an alliance with them that will either strengthen Prime Mininster Maliki or replace hime with a Sunni strong man. Then Bush will have the US troops work with the Sunni’s to restore order to Iraq and install a government “friendly” to America to strongarm the Iraqi people. (Bush’s version of a democratic government. Then Bush will keep US troops in Iraq at the permanent bases.
Unfortunately Bush is not living in the real world. Just like his other plans this plan will not succeed. According to Nir Rosen:
The reality of what is happening in Iraq is that the Sunni’s are going to go down in defeat. Whether or not American troops are there. The plans on the table with the best chance of success are the plans proposed by Senator Jim Webb--an orderly troop withdrawal while simultaneously working with Syria and Iran who have influence in Iraq and who have a strong interest in a stabilized, peaceful Iraq.
If Bush and his team are unwilling or unable to face reality they need to be replaced with a tean that can. A team that is able to work with Syria and Iran to help the US do the best we can with the awful disaster Beorge W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their neocon cronies have created in the middle east.
Unfortunately, it looks like Jim Webb was right when he said that the people that made this mess are not going to be able to fix it.
Americans need to stop letting their President try to blame the victims--the Iraqis--or anyone else for this mess. It's time for Bush and the neocons to take responsibility and be held accountable for this disaster (and others).
Bush’s New Plan has the following goals: keep the troops in Iraq stationed at permanent bases, reduce American casualties, and reduce Iran’s influence. This is NOT the plan of the American people who voted loud and clear that they want the troops out of Iraq asap.
John McCain is an ally of the so called “new” Bush Plan. It’s not difficult to assume that Robert Gates is on board with this new plan also. Why else would Bush move so quickly to put his Rumsfeld replacement before a Congress that remains Republican controlled for a very short time. Bush had to move quickly to get “his” new “Rumsfeld” on board.
Bush plans to negotiate a ceasefire with the insurgent Sunni’s and then create an alliance with them that will either strengthen Prime Mininster Maliki or replace hime with a Sunni strong man. Then Bush will have the US troops work with the Sunni’s to restore order to Iraq and install a government “friendly” to America to strongarm the Iraqi people. (Bush’s version of a democratic government. Then Bush will keep US troops in Iraq at the permanent bases.
Unfortunately Bush is not living in the real world. Just like his other plans this plan will not succeed. According to Nir Rosen:
“....Shias own Iraq now. Sunnis can never get it back. There's nothing Americans can do about this.
So, for Sunnis, whether these reports are true or not, for Sunnis to ever imagine that they could ever regain power, that the Baathists could ever be restored to power, that Americans actually matter in Iraq anymore is naïve in the extreme. Iraq is Shia now. They have the majority, the security forces, they have the militias. What you are going to see in Iraq I think, in Baghdad especially, is a virtual genocide of the Sunnis. And the Americans are going to be unable to stop that.”
The reality of what is happening in Iraq is that the Sunni’s are going to go down in defeat. Whether or not American troops are there. The plans on the table with the best chance of success are the plans proposed by Senator Jim Webb--an orderly troop withdrawal while simultaneously working with Syria and Iran who have influence in Iraq and who have a strong interest in a stabilized, peaceful Iraq.
If Bush and his team are unwilling or unable to face reality they need to be replaced with a tean that can. A team that is able to work with Syria and Iran to help the US do the best we can with the awful disaster Beorge W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their neocon cronies have created in the middle east.
Unfortunately, it looks like Jim Webb was right when he said that the people that made this mess are not going to be able to fix it.
Americans need to stop letting their President try to blame the victims--the Iraqis--or anyone else for this mess. It's time for Bush and the neocons to take responsibility and be held accountable for this disaster (and others).
According to Nir Rosen:
There is no solution. We’ve destroyed Iraq and we’ve destroyed the region, and Americans need to know this. This isn’t Rwanda where we can just sit back and watch the Hutus and Tutsis kill each other, and be like wow this is terrible should we do something? We destroyed Iraq. There was no civil war in Iraq until we got there. And there was no civil war in Iraq, until we took certain steps to pit Sunnis against Shias. And now it is just too late. But, we need to know we are responsible for what’s happening in Iraq today. I don't think Americans are aware of this. We've managed to make Saddam Hussein look good even to Shias at this point. And what we’ve managed to do is not only destabilize Iraq, but destabilize Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran. This is going to spread for decades, the region won’t recover from this, I think for decades. And Americans are responsible . AMY GOODMAN: Do you think troop withdrawal now, if not an answer, a necessity? NIR ROSEN: Troop withdrawal, if I was an American, then I would want troop withdrawal, because why are Americans dying in Iraq? Every single American who dies in Iraq, who is injured in Iraq, dies for nothing. He didn’t die for freedom, he didn’t die to defend his country, he died to occupy Iraq. And if withdrawal the troops you’ll have less Americans killing Iraqis. Everyday the Americans are there they kill innocent Iraqis, they torture innocent Iraqis, and the occupy Iraqis and terrorize Iraqis. They should leave today.
Americans also need to face reality. I agree with Nir Rosen that there is no solution and we need to withdraw our troops immediately.
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