Print this post.By David Glenn Cox | April 10, 2011
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”—John F. Kennedy
Madison, Wisconsin, Capitol filled with protesters.
I BEGAN THIS ARTICLE before the events in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race were announced. When I first heard of this rape of a public franchise my hands began to tremble with rage. You see in a past life I was once an assistant poll manager in Georgia. Every state handles its elections a little differently but the processes are the same. Every box, polling machine or computer terminal is numbered, locked and sealed. Each device is checked and then sealed again when the poll is set up the night before the election.
There comes a time when the Gordian knot must be cut when the systems and processes which might have been used to correct the errors and injustices of the meandering course of human affairs have been broken and have become decrepit. But worse still, it is when these processes have not become broken or decrepit but have been intentionally mutilated and deformed into a monstrosity.
Upon opening the poll each seal is checked and the information is recorded. The number of votes cast on each machine or terminal are recorded every hour and listed on a sheet for each device. When the poll closes the totals are calculated in each box, machine or terminal and recorded on a line of the count sheet corresponding to each reading of vote counts during the day. These numbers are tabulated so if you have 30,000 votes cast the candidates vote totals must match the 30,000 total.
Anyone who has worked at a gas station or convenience store or has ever read gas pump totals understands this system. This concept that a poll manager, assistant poll manger or even poll clerk could make the mistake claimed to have been by a county clerk is a statistical impossibility. The chances that a (so called) bookkeeping error could be discovered at the eleventh hour would leave a sane public incredulous.
The idea that this booking error would not only swing an election but also put the vote total magically beyond recall is instructive. This mythical count sheet now lost or thrown away is yet another absurdity as no document or worksheet is ever under any circumstance not saved or thrown away.
If this was perhaps a one off event then perhaps excuses of incompetence could be accepted and excused but this is just one more event, one more brick in the wall. We are over the Rubicon here, we are veterans of stolen elections, this is no longer our first rodeo and when your elections are on their face fraudulent then you can no longer claim to live in a free democracy. The free people of Wisconsin and those of us watching from outside the state have witnessed a state government administration which is at war with its own citizens. The ends justify the means, rules are subverted and laws are broken or ignored. The power is clearly no longer in the hands of the people of Wisconsin.
But let us pull back from this cancerous cell of Wisconsin and look instead at the sick patient in total. Your country is at perpetual war as new villains are named periodically while threats are hurled at other nations whose only crime is to interfere with our corporate profit potential. In our ten years of uninterrupted war there has been little or no progress on any front other than that of emptying the treasury.
Your government allies itself to support the most brutal despots on the planet. Your government will only help revolutionary movements which offer them financial gain or mineral wealth.
The people of the United States are opposed to these foreign wars and to this adventurous policy but because your government is so corrupt and cancerous that it makes no difference. Just as the American people are opposed to nuclear power and deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, these things are instructive because it illustrates just how unimportant the desires and wishes of the American public really are to the true administrators of this nation.
In 2007, the economy after more than eight years of manipulation collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. The most basic structures of the economy have become infected. Record numbers of banks have failed and trillions of dollars have been paid out to assist the criminals in their get aways. Record numbers of Americans are now chronically unemployed, forty millions have lost their homes and your government’s only answer for them is tax cuts.
Tax cuts to buy new cars, tax cuts to buy new homes, tax cuts to hold on to their stocks a little longer. Government grants to huge wealthy corporations for research and development. Billion of dollars in grants to prosperous private corporations to build factories. What solutions has this government offered for those struggling millions of American workers? What has been done for their families? What has been done for their children? A complete abdication and abandonment of the welfare and well being of the citizens of the United States.
In 1960 the minimum wage in the United States of America was one US dollar per hour of labor performed. In 2011 the minimum wage in the United States of America is $7.25 per hour labor performed but if you take the 1960 minimum wage and adjust it for inflation then the minimum wage of the United States should be in the range of $18.00 to $22.00 per hour of labor performed.
It means not only a more than fifty percent cut in base wages it means that many workers working in trades and technical careers are earning no more than minimum wage. The national average wage for workers is $22.86 but that figure includes supervisors and straw bosses. Your economy has been cored out and only the husk is left behind. This figure alone and by itself explains so much. It explains the mortgage crisis; it explains why Americans were over extended in their finances.
Despite repeated and massive failures of Free Trade agreements your government persists with even more and more free trade pacts. They see no need for correction or abatement of these programs despite their repeated failures and huge cost, since the implementation of free trade programs the United States has gone from the largest creditor nation to the world’s largest debtor nation and now holds the largest trade debt in human history. And still, your government cries out for more! Democrat or Republican they cry for more! More!
Both parties cry out for more spending cuts to social programs which assist their own citizens while sending $7.5 billion to Pakistan to build schools and roads. Billions for Afghanistan to build roads in a country where the American installed President owns the national concrete company. An Afghan president who was elected Wisconsin style, with corrupt elections and vague promises to do better next time. Millions of dollars shipped off each year to build infrastructure in Mexico to speed the delivery of sweatshop goods while our own infrastructure languishes.
This week Quisling in Chief Obama will begin his public relations work to implement yet another free trade act, this one with the nation of Colombia. The Colombian government for their part of the bargain has promised to try and halt the murders of labor leaders. Colombia is considered the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists. More dangerous than Iran and more dangerous than Venezuela and your government wants to open up free trade with these murderers.
Bloomberg- “This sets the stage for enactment of all three free-trade agreements in the next few months,” Karan Bhatia, vice president in Washington for General Electric and a former deputy U.S. Trade Representative, said in an e-mail. “It is important to U.S. exports, to U.S. jobs, and to the credibility of the U.S. as an international trading partner.”
“Vice President for General Electric and a former deputy U.S. Trade Representative,” a former cabinet Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security now representing the company that sells the TSA scanners. Monsanto executives working for the Agriculture Department. Goldman Sachs employees who now run the Treasury Department. Pharmaceutical executives working in the Food & Drug Administration. Poison pet food, poison baby food, toxic drywall, failed banks, deadly medicines and your government, cries more! Democrats and Republicans unite as one as they cry out for still more! More!
Bloomberg- “This proves the United States can still lead on trade,” Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobbying group, said today in a statement.”
Bloomberg- “The trade agreement would boost U.S. shipments to Colombia by $1.1 billion a year from $12 billion in 2010, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission. For Colombia, the deal would lock in unilateral trade privileges that are subject to renewal by Congress, providing greater certainty to investors. The preferences lapsed in February, dealing a blow to Colombian textile makers and flower growers.”
Read the paragraph above twice, a ten percent increase in U.S. sales but “the deal would lock in unilateral trade privileges that are subject to renewal by Congress, providing greater certainty to investors.” Are they trying to say that Colombians would be investing in the United States and creating jobs? Or are they saying a greater certainty for U.S. investors in Colombia? They said it themselves, “the deal would lock in unilateral trade privileges that are subject to renewal by Congress,” taking trade policy out of the hands of your government and codifying it forever with a nation which murders labor leaders.
There are a hundred reasons for rebellion; there are as well, a hundred reasons to look away. To pretend that these things are not as they appear to be, that this national Katrina in which we live was our fault after all. A life of complexity that wakes us at dawn with memories of the sweetness of our pasts versus the bitterness of our collective futures. The locks on the doors of the empty store fronts that mirror the locks on our own lives.
A government that does not put the well being of its citizens as its first objective is a tyranny. A government whose policies benefit the few over the many is a sham. A government that does not protect its elections makes itself a fraud. War is the failure of politics and a government whose politics are war is unholy and unclean. So then revolution begins not with a brick, or a shout, or a gun but with a realization. A realization that the responsibility for life falls on our shoulders and we are in the breech.
It begins in the beating of our hearts and in an unwillingness to accept fraud, sham or tyranny as a way of life.
Author’s Bio: Who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I am really. Given a front row seat for the generation of the 1960’s I lived in Chicago in 1960. My father was a Democratic precinct captain, my mother an election judge. His father had been a Union organizer and had been beaten and jailed for his efforts. His first time in jail was for punching a Ku Klux Klansman during a parade in the 1930’s. I never felt as if I was raised in a family of activists but seeing it print makes me think, yes. That is a part of who I am. We find ourselves today living in a world treed by the hounds of madness, a complicit media covering contrite parties. Multilevel media, giving more access to communication yet stunting actual communication. More noise, less voice, more sound less music, more law less justice, more medicine less life.