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January6DemoAction * EconomicHitman * Quagmire


04 January 2005
Dear Senator:

You took an oath to defend and protect the Constitution
of the United States from its enemies both foreign and domestic.
On January 6th your sincerity and commitment to that oath will be tested.
And history will judge you by your actions..



The people who cast the votes decide nothing.
The people who count the votes decide everything.


– Joseph Stalin



1) Thursday January 6 ~ Official or Contested 2004 US Election
- - Election Update on pivotal day for a US democracy?
- - Dear Senator to defend and protect the Constitution
- - Dialing In For Democracy - Now Is Critical - by Thom Hartmann
2) Return of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
3) Robert Fisk Looks Back at 2004

Editor's Notes:


This Thursday is the big day for a joint session of Congress to certify or to investigate the election of George W. Bush. Please join thousands of conscious human beings realizing what is at stake - US democracy itself, and the lives of many people in other nations, threatened by an administration with a foreign and domestic policy gone haywire. The first item provides an update and resources for actions from now to January 6th. This action is time-sensitive. Please do not delay. Our voices are critical. Item 2 is on a Democracy Now interview with John Perkins, author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions." Perkins will also be speaking at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA, on January 11 at 7 PM. And item 3 links to a recent article by Robert Fisk looking back at 2004: "Over the past year, there has been evidence enough that our whole project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that our Western armies - when they are not torturing prisoners, killing innocents and destroying one of the largest cities in Iraq - are being vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we have not seen before in the Middle East." Yet, if there is a chance for a turnaround from horrendous US policies, this Thursday will tell us if the US government is ready for democracy in action, or will authorize a dictatorship. Now's the time to contact your Senator and John Kerry to defend and protect the US Constitution.

Call the U.S. capitol switchboard 1-800-839-5276 or 1-202-224-3121

Then call back two more times and urge Senators to stand up beside Representative John Conyers, Jr. He needs just one Senator's support.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent
about things that matter.


– Martin Luther King, Jr.



1) Thursday January 6 ~ Official or Contested 2004 US Election

- - Election Update on pivotal day for a US democracy?
- - Dear Senator to defend and protect the Constitution
- - Dialing In For Democracy - Now Is Critical - by Thom Hartmann

- - Election Update on pivotal day for a US democracy?

We are approaching a pivotal day in the history of our Democracy. This Thursday, the electors will meet in a joint session of Congress to certify the election of George W. Bush. As you know, Congressman John Conyers has been leading an investigation into voting irregularities in Ohio. Last week he stated that he will contest the Ohio electors because of "numerous unexplained irregularities in the Ohio presidential vote, many of which appear to violate both federal and state law." Conyers sent a letter to all Senators asking for their support. If only one agrees, we will see something that has never happened before in the history of our country. In a nutshell, the Constitution states that if one Senator and one Congressman contest the electors from a particular state, then the entire Congress must debate the issue..

Conyers has stated on two different radio programs that he believes he will have a Senator, or even more than one, join him in contesting the election. However he has not specifically named any anyone, and no Senator has publicly stated that they will. For now, we know that many Senators are hearing from their constituents, asking them to do it. And many of these Senators are considering it while they weigh the facts.

This is why it is vital that we all contact our Senators (and Congresspeople) to show our support and encourage them to contest the election.

Remember, this is not about Kerry vs. Bush, and it's not about Democrat vs. Republican. It's about our Democracy.

It will all happen at 1pm on Thursday and it will be televised on CSPAN. Be sure to watch, but consider this: the price of admission is a phone call to each of your representatives.

Meanwhile, more details about what happened on November 2nd continue to surface.

A new report states that the media was given improper (and possibly illegal) direct access to the machines that count the votes.

And those pesky exit polls just won't go away. A new report on the National Exit poll shows a very high probability that Kerry actually won the popular vote.

It's all on Solar Bus:

http://election.solarbus.org

Peace to all,
Gary Beckwith

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- - Dear Senator to defend and protect the Constitution

Dear Senator:

You took an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States from its enemies both foreign and domestic. On January 6th your sincerity and commitment to that oath will be tested. And history will judge you by your actions.

There is abundant evidence of election irregularities that bring into question whether the electors from Ohio were lawfully chosen and lawfully seated, based on numerous errors, improprieties and voter complaints.

Evidence continues to mount indicating that even the Ohio recount is being thwarted by election officials brazenly engaged in a cover-up designed to destroy the random nature of the recount, as well as its accuracy, reliability and trustworthiness.

If a President can be selected in this country as a result of unlawful conduct, then the rule of law, and with it the root of our democracy, has ceased to exist.

It is your duty to challenge the vote of the Ohio (and Florida) electors for President or Vice President of the United States, and to accept the vote of the electors who were lawfully chosen by the voters of the State of Ohio, who are committed to voting for John F. Kerry and John Edwards as President and Vice President of the United States respectively.

History will judge you by whether you honor your duty. This is something for which you will have to answer not only to the people of the United States, and to your constituents, but to your own families, your children and grandchildren, and to your own conscience.

I implore you to do your duty in defense of democracy. Do not allow our "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" to perish from the Earth. Stand up to defend our great nation which introduced democracy to the modern world.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME
ADDRESS

PLEASE GET THIS MESSAGE TO YOUR SENATORS AND SENATOR JOHN KERRY!

Call the U.S. capitol switchboard 1-800-839-5276 or 1-202-224-3121
Then call back two more times and urge each of your Senators to stand up beside Representative John Conyers, Jr., the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee. He needs just one Senator's support.

Let's flood the Senate with calls leading up to and by noon on January 6th.

To send faxes to Senators by email, see:
http://miamedia.com/news/2004-12-28.efax.your.senator.html

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- - Dialing In For Democracy - Now Is Critical - by Thom Hartmann
Published January 3, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Dialing In For Democracy - Now Is Critical
by Thom Hartmann

[Excerpt]

Jeff Taylor is one of Vermont's three electors - representatives elected by the citizens of Vermont to vote for President of the United States. He and his two peers have joined the electors of several other states in signing resolutions asking their state's congressional delegation to protest the Ohio slate of electors.

"If they can have fair elections in Kiev," Taylor told me, "why not in Cleveland?"

Here's what troubles Taylor:

If you flip a coin a hundred times, odds are that around fifty times it will come up heads and fifty times tails. In reality, it may be 49-51 or even 47-53, but it will always pretty much evenly split. That's the nature of random events, including random errors and mistakes.

So if the tens of thousands of election "irregularities" being reported all across the nation - but particularly in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, and North Carolina - showed "irregularities" worked randomly to the benefit of both parties, it would be easy to say that we have a broken, but not a stolen or hacked, election system. But that was not the case.

In nearly every case now documented, producing odds not of 50:50 but, according to credible statisticians, sometimes rising to 1:250,000,000, "irregularities" seem always to favor George W. Bush or other Republican candidates. These include:


- machine errors

- misplaced machines

- unmailed absentee ballots

- certification of more votes than registered voters in some areas, and dramatically low voter turnouts in other areas

- modem-connected voting machines and tabulators

- different standards for provisional ballot recounts in different areas

- phony companies registering voters and then tearing up the registrations of people who checked one party but not the other

- voting machines defaulting to a particular candidate or 'jumping' by recording a vote for one candidate when another's button was pushed

- exit polls not corresponding with reported votes

- voting elections officials creating what look like phony election machine poll tapes and tossing original, signed tabulations in the garbage.

And while the vast majority of the "irregularities" in 2004 are breaking to the benefit of George W. Bush, they also did so in 2000, and for Republicans generally in 2002.

It's time to start using the "F" word. George W. Bush was made President of the United States in 2000 by fraud, and apparently has done it again.

First, 2000.

As The New York Times reported on November 12, 2001, in an article titled "Examining The Vote: The Overview" by Ford Fessenden and John M. Broder, a media consortium was pulled together to actually count every questionable ballot in the 2000 Florida election.

The media consortium included The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and CNN. The group hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in January to examine the ballots. The research group employed teams of three workers they called coders to examine each undervoted ballot and mark down what they saw in detail. Three coders provided a bulwark against inaccuracy or bias in the coding. For overvotes, one coder was used because there was seldom disagreement among examiners in a trial run using three coders.

The data produced by the ballot review allows scrutiny of the disputed Florida vote under a large number of situations and using a variety of different standards that might have applied in a hand recount, including the appearance of a dimple, a chad dangling by one or more corners and a cleanly punched card.

The result clearly demonstrated that Al Gore won the 2000 Florida vote. But the Supreme Court, in the lawsuit initiated by George W. Bush against Al Gore now known as 'Bush v. Gore', ruled that "irreparable harm" might be done to candidate Bush if such a recount was performed in Florida by Florida authorities. Justice Antonin Scalia, in his concurring majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, wrote that "The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election."

And Scalia was right, if "irreparable harm" means that counting all the votes may lead to the petitioner [Bush] "losing an election." When the Consortium examined all the ballots statewide, noted the Times, "The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to 'count all the votes.'"

..And now, in 2004, we are again visited by a Stalinesque fusion of cronies funding and controlling the election apparatus, national media intimidated into silence, and a populace so preoccupied with daily survival concerns - and uneasy about being identified as "troublemakers" by a new, highly centralized state security apparatus - that they don't have the means or time to react.

Yet react we must.

Congressman John Conyers has conducted hearings in Ohio, which uncovered sufficient evidence to call into question - at least in the mind of the Congressman himself and many associated with him - the validity of the Ohio vote.

The Electoral College was modeled after a form of governance used by the British before the Norman invasion in 1066, as documented in The History of England As Well Ecclesiastical As Civil by Paul de Rapin Thoyras, one of the two books that Thomas Jefferson repeatedly cited as the most important histories every written.

It's been out of print for two centuries, but in my copy, printed in London in 1728, Thoyras writes, presaging language later re-used in the U.S. Constitution, "Now in order to preserve a perfect Union, it was necessary some way of communication and intercourse between them [the people in remote locations and their government] shou'd be established. This was done by the means of a Wittena-Gemot or Assembly of Wise Men, who were the Representatives of the whole Nation. This Method the Saxons brought with them from Germany, where all publick affairs were transacted in such like conventions...[including their] Presidents." (Italics from the original.)

Section II, Article 2 of the Constitution, amended by the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, create and define the Electoral College, modeled by the Framers after the Saxon Wittena-Gemot. Each state chooses its own electors any way it wants, although all today do so by election of the people.

Electors have already met in the various states to vote, but that vote will not be opened until Thursday, January 6th. If Conyers' protest is matched by the protest of at least one single senator, then the House and Senate retire to their respective chambers for a maximum of two hours to debate the legitimacy of the Ohio (and, possibly, other) electoral slates. After two hours, with a maximum of 5 minutes for any member to speak, a vote is taken. If both the House and the Senate vote by majority to sustain the challenge, then the presidential vote goes to the House of Representatives, where each state has a single vote.

Given that Republicans control both the House and Senate, and a majority of states were "red" in this past election, even if a senator joins Conyers it won't change the outcome of this election, unless between now and Thursday such massive, credible evidence of election-changing vote fraud is presented that even Republicans will agree that the election was stolen. Given how often Republicans in the House and Senate have placed the interest of their party's power above the needs and interests of democracy or the nation in the past few decades, it's extremely unlikely that a challenge will result in a change in the election.

But - vitally - it will put the issues of vote fraud in America on the table in a way that even the mainstream media can no longer ignore. And it may lead to getting private, Republican-affiliated corporations out of handling our votes in secret, and to other electoral reforms such as IRV and public financing of elections. It could be a huge step in pulling us back from the brink of the Stalinist state the Bush administration seems determined to lead us into.

Rallies are being held in Columbus, Ohio and Washington, DC, and news stories of them are easily found on this and other progressive news sites. But for those who can't travel, perhaps the most important step you can take today is to call your two senators at 1-202-224-3121 or 1-800-839-5276 and ask them to join Conyers in his protest of the Ohio electors. This is particularly important if you live in California, West Virginia, Minnesota, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maryland, Illinois, or Maine, as those state have senators who may be more inclined to join Conyers than most.

Make your call now. It's one of the last ways we can still reach our elected representatives without a Republican corporation in the middle.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," "The Edison Gene", and "What Would Jefferson Do?."

For the complete article, see:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0103-32.htm



2) Return of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

John Perkins was recently featured on the entire Democracy Now! program on December 31, 2004. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies.

For the Democracy Now! transcript, audio, video links for program -
Friday, December 31st, 2004 - Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:
How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

See: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/31/1546207

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Author John Perkins will be speaking at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley on January 11 at 7 PM. To find out more about the book and read an excerpt, click: http://www.bkconnection.com/ProdDetails.asp?ID=1576753018



3) Robert Fisk Looks Back at 2004

A Mire of Death, Lies and Atrocities
The Ghosts of Vietnam
by Robert Fisk
The Mire of Death, Lies and Atrocities:

Robert Fisk says, "Over the past year, there has been evidence enough that our whole project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that our Western armies - when they are not torturing prisoners, killing innocents and destroying one of the largest cities in Iraq - are being vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we have not seen before in the Middle East."

For the complete article, see:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=6952
or
http://207.44.245.159/article7602.htm


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