by Bob Fitrakis

Every 30 years or so, the American Left recreates itself: the Communists and Socialists of the 1930s’ “Red Decade” later became the decentralized, radical Students for a Democratic Society and New Left of the 1960s. And it looks like it’s the multiculturalism and direct action of Anti-Racist Action (ARA) for the ’90s.

The program for the ARA’s Third Annual Conference, held last weekend, screamed: “Do Something!” It had a photo of an activist taking a swing at a bloated, pot-bellied, berobed, coneheaded Klansman. Entering the old North High School, where the ARA conference was held, I got the sense that something was indeed happening here. Grizzled veterans of ’60s and ’70s anti-war and anti-imperialist movements mingled freely with the next New Left. Before the weekend was over, I had attended workshops on racism and fascism, marched and been Maced at-and been cited as the leader of-a demonstration against police brutality. Welcome to activism ’90s style.

At the opening of the conference Friday night, the mostly “straight-edge” Generation X participants-wearing “Fuck Racism” T-shirts, the “Mean People Suck” slogan taken to its logical extreme-exuded an aura that made the Weathermen look like the Brady Brunch. But, how much was posing and posturing? This new generation of anti-racist militants has grown up knowing no movement victories. The Civil Rights movement-which brought the end of legalized apartheid in America in 1965-is ancient history. The anti-war struggle is like those war stories that the World War II GIs used to tell their kids and grandkids in the ’50s.

This new breed of activists has done battle in the cities, suburbs and small towns of North America against the rising tide of neo-fascists and neo-Nazis ushered in by the rhetoric of the Reagan and Bush eras and the infamous political “wedge issues” of immigrant and welfare-mother bashing, a tide not quelled by the hollow promises of President Clinton’s law-and-order-centrist policies.

And this is true not only for the Americans present, but for the large Canadian contingent as well. The dozens of ARA members from Toronto are hardened by their ongoing battle with white supremacists in the Great White North. Toronto is the home of Ernest Zundel, a key player in the international Nazi movement. From his fortress at 206 Carlton, Zundel runs Samisdat Publishing, one of the largest Nazi propaganda operations on the planet. His chief goal is to deny the Holocaust, producing such publications as: “Did Six Million Really Die?” and “The Hitler We Loved And Why.”

Canadian courts have dismissed Holocaust denial charges against Zundel, instead characterizing his work as concerning “ethnic conflict between Germans and Jews.” Yeah, and those death camp ovens were used for making bagels. Zundel’s racist skinhead (“bonehead”) followers revere him as a hero and chant, “Six million more!”

But like the conference cover photo depicts, when government action fails in Canada, this new breed of anti-fascist activist is willing to use other means: Zundel’s property was recently torched. Shedding light on the rise of the American Religious Right on the conference’s opening night was an old friend of mine from Detroit, Russ Bellant. His new book, The Religious Right in Michigan Politics, is the first to investigate and document the origins and objectives of the popular group the Promise Keepers (PK). Many are familiar with former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney’s original 1990 vision: to fill a stadium with Christian men willing to “reclaim” authority from their wives, capitalizing on the male backlash against the women’s movement and the gender-bashing so prominent now on talk radio.

As Bellant explained, the vast majority of men of various denominations that attend these PK rallies come with good and sincere intentions. I know, my older brother Nick and my younger brother Dave, both plagued by marital problems, now call themselves Promise Keepers. Bellant pointed out how McCartney, while serving as assistant football coach at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, “encountered and was deeply influenced by the Word of God (WOG) Community.” WOG, according to Bellant, practices a “shepherding/discipleship” form of worship that requires total submission to a person called “the head.” He calls Promise Keepers’ views fundamentally “anti-democratic” and potentially “totalitarian” in nature.

“The use of sophisticated lighting and sound in a stadium setting, psychologically playing on people’s emotions, breaking down the denominational differences, and merging nationalism and religion really echoes the Nazi rallies of the Third Reich,” Bellant argued. Bellant demonstrated how virtually all top Christian Right leaders-Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition, D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministry, and Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ-have signed on to the Promise Keepers. The “family values” rhetoric and homophobia are part of a larger “cultural revolution” the PKs hope to bring about. Robertson, Kennedy and Bright, along with James Dodson-the author of Promise Keepers Manifesto, Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper-are all members of the super-secretive radical right Council for National Policy (CNP), according to Bellant.

“The Council for National Policy is not an organization most of you have heard of. Unlike the Christian Coalition, the Council wants to keep itself secret. The Council was created by business and political leaders who were also leaders in the John Birch Society. Its membership includes former Indiana Ku Klux Klan leader Richard Shoff, Jerry Falwell, TV censor Don Wildman, anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly, a handful of pro-apartheid activists and registered agents for the old South African regime, and leaders of the Unification (Moonies) Church,” detailed Bellant.

The CNP members represent the political elite of the radical right and essentially they plan and fund the major projects of the American Right, in Bellant’s analysis. The big bucks come from Jeff Coors and family members of Coors Brewing Company, Linda Bean of L.L. Bean, and Richard DeVos Jr. of Amway and Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt.

“While they appeal to black members, their real agenda is to destroy affirmative action, and they have links to white supremacist ideology,” Bellant concluded.

Surviving a radical demo

Activists attended Saturday sessions such as “Leonard Peltier/Political Prisoners”; “Black-Jewish Relations”; “Lesbian and Gay Oppression”; and the essential “Surviving Radical Demos” to name a few. Having attended, participated, organized and covered literally hundreds of protests and demonstrations in my life, I thought I knew how to survive a radical demo in the mid-’90s. To err is human…

I was asked to bring my portable PA system to the conference at 6 p.m. Saturday for the “Copwatch Rally & March.” No big deal, just another case of journalistic participant-observer in the alternative press. Soon I was wondering who was organizing the event. When I arrived at the kickoff point at Arcadia and High, security guru Chris “The Anarchist” handed me a mike and asked me to speak. “About what?” I queried. “You know, about why we’re marching.” Luckily I was saved by a Columbus Copwatch member who politely asked the gathering horde of Klan and Nazi fighters “to remember that your actions will have repercussions on us in this community.” Virtually all got the message: Give peace a chance tonight.

I briefly addressed the assembled. Having a Ph.D in political science, I knew to announce the intent of the march to the estimated 10 percent that were no doubt undercover cops: “We intend this march to be a lawful demonstration, to protest police brutality and walk the streets of America without fear of the police…” I said more about the Antioch students being beaten at the Federal Building, and the TV4 footage showing the brutalization of students on 12th Avenue, but my main mission had been accomplished: protecting myself from “inciting a riot” charges. Wise move.

A small contingent of anarchists from the “Love and Rage” group unfurled a red-and-black flag. Banners were held with slogans reading “No Police Brutality” and “No Nazis, No Killer Cops, No Fascist USA, Anti-Racist Action.” Appropriate slogans for the 20-something generation whose educational benefits have been cut while government prison spending has been quadrupled.

Other marchers lit torches-lawful, but virtually unheard of in Columbus-creating an eerie and disturbing mood. These weren’t drunken freshmen frat boys reveling in a football victory frenzy. We crossed High Street and more than a hundred people began marching south.

Police squad cars with lights flashing immediately began to “escort” the marchers. They persisted, despite our insistence that we knew our way to 12th Avenue. And as a police helicopter began to hover overhead, I heard an unfamiliar chant: “Aim high, pigs in the sky!”

Just before Blake, in front of the Radio Shack and 24-hour video store, shit happened. Stuck hauling the PA system, I heard a scuffle and turned to see a weird scene. My mind at first rejected it: there was a female police officer without riot gear, attempting to arrest a male marcher. He had his hands raised out to his sides and she was screaming and pulling on his arm. Someone was pulling on his other arm, a literal tug-of-war. Someone in the crowd was yelling “Fuck the pigs!” Seems one Jason Robert Maffettone, 27, of Hoboken, New Jersey had stepped off the curb in Columbus, “jaywalkers gulch.” Omigod.

Officer Julie Appenzeller, sworn to serve and protect the people of Columbus from all jaywalkers, foreign and domestic, was just doing her job. Startled and disbelieving male officers stood by their gal as the crowd and I shouted “No police brutality! Let him go!” The infamous “Have Mace-will spray you” Columbus cops drew their black cans. When you’re chanting into a mike, you can’t always pay attention when someone’s aiming at your big round head. Just my luck. I met up with Officer Generic Cop, 6′1″ with black hair and a mustache, who of course finished first at the police academy in Mace target shooting. I didn’t actually see the Mace; I felt it when it drenched my eyes. For 10 to 15 seconds I was really mad. This asshole clearly hadn’t read the U.S. Constitution, nor Columbus police procedure on Macing. He’d flunk my American Guv class. Moot point as my eyes began to burn, lungs sear, and nose clog up. Still, chanting into a mike on a sidewalk does not constitute menacing a police officer.

Let’s see, five minutes into an anti-police brutality march and I’ve been Maced. Go figure. I pride myself on never getting Maced. I hadn’t been Maced since the day after the Klan killed civil rights marchers in Greensboro, North Carolina. My mind raced. When was that? 1979? ‘80? Anyway, it was probably tear gas. Or was it pepper gas at Kent State in ‘78?

Deja vu all over again. I was on my knees choking and crawling, my Columbus tax dollars at work again. Being the brave journalist that I am, I thought I’d best crawl into the video store to wash out my eyes. Luckily my alternative press fame had preceded me. The clerk greeted me with a cheery: “Hi Bob!” The Earl Smith-Jim Karnes debate over porno shops aside, it seems the only restroom was in the Triple X adult section of the store. Half-blinded but still able to make out the images of assorted sex toys, I made my way to the counter. “Bathroom,” I pleaded. The clerk had seen it all before. “Honest, I’ve got Mace in my eyes. It’s not a Pee Wee Herman thing.” He advised, “Just ride it out. The water will only make it worse.” A voice of authority.

Outside, things had calmed down and I found myself at the end of the march. Fortunately, one young ARA activist was carrying a squirt tube of Bausch and Lomb sensitive eye contact lens cleaner. “It’ll work, dude. Like, I sprayed myself with some Mace and tested it.” It was like a miracle. No Columbus activist should leave home without it.

Freed of the speaker system, now safely stashed at an ARA safe house on High Street thanks to Chris “The Anarchist,” I moved to the front of the march. There I met 30 or so police in riot gear, and reporters from the Columbus Dispatch, TV4 and 10.

I had a new goal. Keep from getting Maced again. Tensions mounted as the marchers, now swelled to nearly 300, found themselves pinned against a construction fence in the middle of the campus. Would the police attack? Undoubtedly, they were wondering the same about us. Instead of confronting the police, we found an opening at the Wexner Center and snaked through the campus. Thank God for secular humanist bastions of liberalism. One lone campus police car escorted us several blocks back to High Street. We figured the campus cops were unlikely to Mace us, but they might order us to do a big group hug.

The moment of truth. Should we walk down 12th Avenue? What the hell, it’s still America, why not? The march ended almost without incident as we re-emerged at 15th and High and gathered in the open space in front of the Wexner Center.

Just before the end of the march, a lone police commander joined the marchers. The word went out that he was looking for Fitrakis. No doubt, I thought, to congratulate me for my fine work in averting a riot. Wrong again. The first tip off was when he wouldn’t shake my hand. And then his first words stung like the Mace: “I’m Commander Marcum. Why are you writing those lies about me?”

How the hell was I to know he’d been reassigned from supervisor of Police Intelligence to riot patrol at OSU? And anyway, those tips about his family’s links to gambling in last week’s Alive were from my most reliable law enforcement sources. I asked him what the real story was, but he wouldn’t tell me. “Your paper’s printing lies.” Later that night the police reported that no Mace was used on the demonstrators.

The next day’s Dispatch reported that I “led” the rally. I didn’t mean to, but as my old marching buddy Mark Stansbery explained it, “There really was no leadership. And after Bob got Maced, he was really pissed.”

The ARA doesn’t really have leaders. It’s a new movement of leaderless resistance to police brutality and the prison industrial complex.

The Dispatch also reported the post-Macing chant as: “Police brutality, we’re sick and…tired of it.” Insert “fuckin’” where the ellipse is. That’s the mood of these young ARA activists. America is incubating a whole new generation of hard-core fascist-fighters that are sick and tired. “And tired of being sick and tired.” They’re not the Promise Keepers, but they are the product of America’s broken promises and dreams.

7/16/1998
FEATURED ARTICLE
The Shapiro murder file
Police accidently release a report linking
Leslie Wexner and the Mob
by Bob Fitrakis

The ghost of Arthur Shapiro—a prominent local attorney who was slain in a 1985 “mob-style murder”—continues to haunt the City of Columbus. Shapiro’s doomed soul was resurrected recently when the Columbus Division of Police released the controversial—and once believed destroyed—document investigating his death.

Columbus Alive obtained a copy of the “Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” report through a public records request on Friday. As previously reported in Alive, the report confirms that the name of central Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner was linked “with associates reputed to be organized crime figures.” The names of businessman Jack Kessler, former Columbus City Council President and current Wexner associate Jerry Hammond and current City Council member Les Wright also appear in the report.

The ghost of Arthur Shapiro—a prominent local attorney who was slain in a 1985 “mob-style murder”—continues to haunt the City of Columbus. Shapiro’s doomed soul was resurrected recently when the Columbus Division of Police released the controversial—and once believed destroyed—document investigating his death.

Columbus Alive obtained a copy of the “Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” report through a public records request on Friday. As previously reported in Alive, the report confirms that the name of central Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner was linked “with associates reputed to be organized crime figures.” The names of businessman Jack Kessler, former Columbus City Council President and current Wexner associate Jerry Hammond and current City Council member Les Wright also appear in the report.

In June 1991, the document’s potentially explosive revelations caused Columbus Police Chief James G. Jackson to order the public record destroyed the same month it was completed. When confronted by Channel 4 News with the document last week, Jackson said, “I thought I got rid of it.” He termed the report “scandalous.”

Another high-ranking law enforcement official familiar with the Shapiro investigation disagrees. “The report is a viable and valuable document in an open murder investigation, although it’s a horrible mistake to make it public,” the official said last week.

City Attorney Janet Jackson called Columbus Alive Tuesday and confirmed that the unredacted document was accidentally released to Alive in response to our public-information request. The report “was released quite frankly in error,” Jackson said, adding that publication of its details could be “very embarrassing” to many people.

In response to a request to Police Chief James Jackson for comment on the release of the file, Sherry Jones of the Columbus Division of Police said Monday, “The chief has no comment.”

In 1996, following a mayoral investigation of Chief Jackson and other top police officers, the Columbus Civil Service Commission found Jackson guilty of destroying the Shapiro report. He received a five-day suspension for the destruction of a public record and another charge of showing favoritism in the discipline of Commander Walter Burns.

Elizabeth A. Leupp, an analyst with Columbus police’s Organized Crime Bureau, began researching and writing the report in early 1991. She sent the report to Intelligence Bureau Commander Curtis K. Marcum on June 6, 1991. Sources say the report remained “hidden” until Jackson ordered its destruction. Marcum bypassed the police legal bureau in carrying out Jackson’s order, according to the mayoral investigative team.

This team, initiated by Safety Director Thomas W. Rice Sr., and under the direction of Assistant Safety Director David D. Sturtz, stumbled on to the destruction of the Shapiro report while investigating missing documents relating to escort services and prostitution. A ledger seized from Marcum’s office contained a reference to Jackson’s order to destroy the report. Reportedly, the only reason the document still exists is because Deputy Chief Robert Kern gave a copy to the Columbus FBI office.

Following the sensational mob-style slaying of Shapiro on March 6, 1985, the report noted that “an analytical project” was started “because of the strong similarities between this homicide and a Mafia (L.C.N.) [La Cosa Nostra] ‘hit.’”

Shapiro was a partner in the now-defunct Columbus law firm of Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm & Warren. The firm “represented the Limited,” according to the report, and “prior to his death, Arthur Shapiro managed this account for the law firm.” Homicide squad investigators described Shapiro as “a quiet, shy, private, secretive person” who “tended to be a ‘loner.’”

Just prior to his murder, Shapiro “was the subject of an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service because he had failed to file income tax returns for some seven years prior to his death, and he had invested in some questionable tax shelters,” the report stated. His death “occurred one day prior to Shapiro’s scheduled appearance before a Grand Jury in the I.R.S. investigation, and there was some conjecture that Shapiro was in position to provide information to the Grand Jury that would have been damaging to some other party.”

Who wanted Shapiro killed and why remains a mystery to Columbus police.

“Thus, while the motive remains unclear, the suspect is an individual who (a) knew Shapiro and had some personal/professional contact with him; (b) would benefit from his death or from ensuring his silence; (c) had close contact with L.C.N. figures or trusted L.C.N. associates; (d) had the personal financial resources to afford the cost of the contract (‘hit’),” reads Leupp’s analysis in the report.

The Shapiro report relied on information from Columbus Police Intelligence summaries, reports from the Organized Crime Bureau, information from both the Pennsylvania Crime Commission and the New Jersey Crime Commission, major media news reports and intelligence data from MAGLOCLEN—a law-enforcement data bank that gathers and verifies reports on organized crime.

The report analyzed “unusual interactive relations between the following business organizations” and then listed: the Major Chord Jazz Club, in which Jerry Hammond was a prinicipal; The Limited; Walsh Trucking Company; the re-named Schwartz, Kelm, Warren and Rubenstein law firm; Omni Oil Company; the Edward DeBartolo Company of Youngstown, Ohio; and local developer John W. Kessler.

Wexner’s business “relations” with Francis J. Walsh, the owner and chief executive officer of Walsh Trucking Company out of New Jersey, were explored. Alive found that a Limited spokesperson told Women’s Wear Daily in the July 25, 1987 issue that “Walsh has done an excess of 90 percent of the Limited’s” trucking business around the time of Shapiro’s murder. The spokesperson estimated that the current figure was “30 to 35 percent of the Limited’s business.” The Limited, Inc. was described as “Walsh’s single largest customer.”

In July 1984 the New York Department of Law Organized Crime Task Force issued a subpoena for Walsh’s bank records. National Westminster Bank of New York, in response to the subpoena, notified Frank Walsh Financial Resources Company. “The notice was addressed to Frank Walsh Financial Resources at One Limited Parkway”—the address of The Limited.

“Both [Youngstown real estate developer Edward J.] DeBartolo and Walsh have been identified as associates of the Genovese-LaRocca crime family in Pittsburgh (now called simply the Pittsburgh Family),” the police report states.

As Columbus Alive previously reported, Walsh Trucking Company was incorporated in the state of New Jersey in May 1973 and has had a controversial business history. In August 1984, a federal jury ordered Walsh Trucking to pay $39.6 million to a smaller competitor that had sued, claiming that Walsh sabotaged its business in New York City’s garment district and destroyed its truck routes. The jury found Walsh Trucking guilty of conspiring to monopolize apparel shipping. In 1987, a U.S. Appeals Court overturned the verdict.

In 1988, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Walsh was charged with making “illegal pay-offs to reported mob figures and officials of Teamster Local 560 which had been under judicial control in an effort to rid it from mob influence.” The May 16, 1988 indictment drew media interest when it named as “unindicted co-conspirators” convicted Genovese crime family boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, alleged crime family captain Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello and three former officials of Local 560—the Provenzano brothers, Anthony, Nunzio, and Salvatore. The Provenzanos, alleged mobsters, have been convicted of various charges in the past and linked in media accounts to the murder of former Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa.

“DeBartolo and Walsh were still considered associates of the Genovese/LaRocca crime family, and Walsh was still providing truck transportation for The Limited,” in 1990, the report stated.

In 1984, DeBartolo and Wexner were partners in a two-month takeover war against Carter-Hawley-Hale stores, the largest West Coast retailer and owner of the prestigious Nieman-Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman stores. Two-and-a-half years later, in November 1986, The Limited and the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation again attempted a hostile takeover of Carter-Hawley-Hale stores with a $1.8 billion cash offer.

The New York Times described the DeBartolo Corporation as “the nation’s largest developer of shopping centers.” The Times referred to Wexner as the “restless, aggressive chairman” of The Limited. Forbes magazine estimated Wexner’s personal fortune at $2.7 billion in 1987, stating, “On paper, at least, he is one of the dozen richest people in America.”

A 1989 New York Times article described “the DeBartolo organization” as a company that “develops shopping malls and owns sports enterprises ranging from the San Francisco 49ers and the Pittsburgh Penguins to small tracks in Louisiana and Ohio.” In September 1990, Edward DeBartolo Jr. was fined $500,000 by NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, according to the Los Angeles Times, “for transferring ownership of the team to Edward DeBartolo’s Corporation without league approval three years ago.”

DeBartolo Jr. made national news late last year when he resigned as chairman and chief executive officer of the 49ers on December 2, 1997 because he was the subject of a federal grand jury hearing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on charges of gambling fraud. DeBartolo bought the 49ers for a reported $17 million in 1977, becoming the youngest NFL owner at age 30. The Rocky Mountain News reported on April 2 this year that DeBartolo was negotiating a deal subject to NFL approval whereby he “would gain full ownership of the franchise in return for giving up his share in the family-Edward DeBartolo Corporation.”

Leupp concluded, “From the predicate facts presented, it appears that Les Wexner had established contact with associates reputed to be organized crime figures, one of whom was a major investment partner and another was using The Limited headquarters as a mailing address.”

“It is not known whether there are other such figures among Wexner’s associates, but it can be hypothesized that the Genovese/LaRocca crime families might consider Wexner a friend,” Leupp speculated.

The Shapiro report noted that “the primary illegal activity of the LaRocca family is gambling…. Its operation extends into the West Virginia panhandle and eastern Ohio. The family has also become well entrenched in legitimate businesses. These include, but probably are not limited to, construction, trucking, food service and vending businesses.” At the time the report was written, the Genovese crime family was considered “second in strength, power, and wealth to the Gambino LCN family.”

A 1991 report by the Pennsylvania Crime Commission assessed that the Genovese/LaRocca network “appears to be strong and capable of continued growth throughout another decade. It has asserted itself as the primary crime group in the [Pittsburgh] area and, by becoming more active in narcotics, has demonstrated its ability to be a full-service criminal organization.”

While investigating the Shapiro homicide, Leupp probed the relationship between the former City Council president and Les Wexner: “Like Arthur Shapiro was, Wexner is considered a very secretive, very private person, and little is known about his business transactions that might raise questions of ethics and legality. For example, while it cannot be proved, it is hypothesized that W & K Partnership was an investment of Wexner and Kessler in Jerry Hammond’s Jazz Club hoping to influence favorable zoning and annexation considerations for ‘Wexley.’”

Sources close to the Shapiro investigation report that early on, investigators wondered whether or not Shapiro had been involved in the preliminary stages of Wexner’s New Albany development project.

John W. “Jack” Kessler co-founded the New Albany Company with Wexner. The Cleveland Plain Dealer explained the genesis of the New Albany project in a February 21, 1993 article: “Legend has it that in 1986 or so, Jack and Les were cruising in Les’ Land Rover near New Albany, about 12 miles from downtown Columbus. They saw acre after acre of empty farmland. Virgin soil. And thus the billionaire, getting a vision thing, declared to his buddy, this will be my new home.” This account places the New Albany project just after Shapiro’s murder.

The politically controversial New Albany project initially involved a tremendous amount of secrecy. As the Plain Dealer explained, “Wexner and Kessler formed the New Albany Co. and spun off a bunch of paper corporations to cover their footprints. Then their minions knocked on doors and made the proverbial offers you couldn’t refuse.”

One of the keys to the development’s success was changing a Columbus policy dating from the 1950s that refused to extend water and sewage contracts to such developments unless they were annexed into the City of Columbus.

The Shapiro report noted that “SNJC Holding, Inc. is named as an investor in the [Major Chord] Jazz Club. It was incorporated August 6, 1987 by James H. Balthaser, attorney with Schwartz, Kelm, Warren and Rubenstein. This law firm was/is legal counsel for The Limited.” SNJC Holding shared Suite 3710 at the Huntington Center with the Wexner Investment Company.

“It was reported that Jerry Hammond purchased Suite 405 in Waterford Tower in August 1988, and there was some question of whether Mr. Hammond’s income at the time would support the mortgage payments. Within the next 18 to 24 months, Mr. Hammond left his position with City Council and with the gas company and the jazz club closed,” Leupp observed.

Contacted for comment on the report Monday, Hammond gave the terse response, “Don’t know anything about it.”

Leupp’s report stated that “Arthur Shapiro was reportedly in direct contact with Vice-Chairman Robert Morosky (‘Number Two’) at the Limited.” And that in June 1987, Morosky “abruptly and inexplicably left his employment with The Limited amid rumors of friction with Les Wexner.” Details of the Morosky-Wexner break-up were covered in the September 1987 Columbus Monthly.

The Shapiro report raises significant questions concerning the business practices of Ohio’s wealthiest citizen, Les Wexner, particularly his association with alleged organized crime associates. As Leupp noted, “While there is no question of ethics or legality on the surface, it is noted that some business organizations and individuals have co-located and become submerged without merging with Wexner and his varied business interests. Most notably is Stanley Schwartz and the large Schwartz, Kelm, Warren and Rubenstein law firm.”

Alive called Wexner’s spokesperson, Al Dietzel, four times for comment about the allegations raised in the police report. After initially offering a phone interview at a specific time Tuesday, Limited spokesman James Temple later said that Dietzel would not be available for comment.

Chief Jackson, under oath during the mayoral investigation, at first couldn’t recall any order to destroy the Shapiro file. Later, when confronted with the ledger and other evidence, both Jackson and his attorney Bill Wilkinson claimed that he destroyed the public document because the chief said it contained bizarre and half-baked theories implicating prominent people that would expose the city to possibly billions of dollars in damages if the document ever became public.

That’s one hypothesis.

The Shapiro report has its own “concluding hypothesis.” Leupp wrote: “Arthur Shapiro could have answered too many of these sorts of questions, and might have been forced to answer them in his impending Grand Jury hearing; Stanley Schwartz might now be able to answer some of the same questions for the same reason, but does not face a Grand Jury, is immersed in the pattern himself, and now has a powerful incentive to maintain discretion.”

Schwartz has since passed away and his law firm closed. Attorney James Balthaser found employment at Thompson, Hine and Flory, the same firm that employs Jackson’s lawyer, Wilkinson.

One of the recommendations made by the mayoral investigation team into the practices of the police department was that Chief Jackson should reconstruct the “Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” report. With the report now public, Jackson needn’t worry about this recommendation. The Shapiro murder remains unsolved.

The specter of Arthur Shapiro continues to haunt Columbus, Ohio. A partner in the prominent Columbus law firm Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm, and Warren that represented transnational corporations like The Limited, Shapiro took two bullets in the head 25 years ago in a Mob-style slaying.

Columbus’ daily monopoly, owned by the conservative Wolfe family, ran a bizarre front page Metro section article entitled: “25-year-old killing still puzzles.” The intent of the Dispatch’s article is clear by the second paragraph: “Twenty-five years later, the slaying remains unsolved, but investigators point to the same man they suspected from the beginning.”

The paper points its finger at the late Berry L. Kessler who died while incarcerated in 2005. The fact that the late sheriff of Franklin County Earl Smith had other more distinguished suspects, as did the state’s former inspector general, a former city of Columbus safety director, as well as sources in the FBI and IRS, eludes the self-proclaimed “Ohio’s Greatest Home Newspaper.”

The Dispatch, in classic cover-up single sourcing, relies solely on the word of Columbus police detective James McCoskey. He told the paper that in investigating Kessler during the Shapiro homicide investigation he found “…a connection, but nothing we could take to court.” Twenty-five years to the day Shapiro was murdered, the Dispatch runs this quote as if it was a new and startling revelation.

So without any new evidence, why would the Columbus Dispatch dig up the old story? In January, CICJ Books published a collection of investigative pieces entitled “Cops, Cover-ups and Corruption” that I wrote while I was a reporter at the Columbus Alive between 1996-2002. In the collection is an award-winning story “The Shapiro Murder File.” The article won a national award for linking a few of Ohio’s most well-known business people to organized crime through a file that had been destroyed by the then-Columbus chief of police, James Jackson.

The Dispatch has since bought up the Alive, ending its brief reign as Ohio’s only muck-raking newspaper. They also eliminated all of the investigative articles that myself and other reporters like Harvey Wasserman wrote from the Alive website. Perhaps there was not enough room on the computer to maintain the copy.

Chief Jackson was charged in 1996 for “improper disposal of a public record for ordering the destruction of a report on the Shapiro homicide,” according to the Dispatch. What they did not write is the more obvious. Columbus’ chief of police destroyed documents pertaining to an ongoing and unsolved Mob-style slaying of a prominent individual tied to central Ohio’s only billionaire – Les Wexner.

The Dispatch’s key paragraph reads as follows: “The Civil Service Commission eventually upheld the charge against Jackson, who said the report was so filled with wild speculation about prominent business leaders that it was potentially libelous.”

The Dispatch pretty much leaves it at that. An unredacted copy of the Shapiro file obtained by the Alive analyzed “unusual interactive relations between the following business organizations” and then listed, among others, The Limited; Walsh Trucking Company; the renamed Schwartz, Kelm, Warren, and Rubenstein Law Firm; Omni Oil Company; the Eddie DeBartolo Company of Youngstown, Ohio; and local developer John W. Kessler.

Jackson destroyed the Shapiro murder file not because of “wild speculation” but because of a detailed analysis linking two of Ohio’s richest men, DeBartolo and Wexner, to the Genovese/LaRocca organized crime families. A similar news story appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988.

The Dispatch, in dismissing the detailed Shapiro murder file report, writes that the document “…speculated that millionaire businessmen in Columbus and Youngstown were linked to the ‘mob-style murder.’ The truth, police investigators say was less complicated.”

The paper only cites one police source: McCosky. It attempts to masquerade Wexner as a “millionaire” when he’s the capital city’s only billionaire, and they refuse to name the well-known DeBartolo family of Youngstown.

One can only wonder why the Wolfe family of Columbus and their paid minions at their daily newsletter are so interested in discrediting perhaps the most important public record in the recent history of Columbus – one that shows real connections between powerful individuals, companies and an organized crime family.

The facts are less complicated. The Columbus Dispatch is covering up for its wealthy friends as it always does.

–
Bob Fitrakis is the author of six books in The Fitrakis Files series. Cops, Coverups and Corruption can be purchased from the http://freepress.org in the Online Store. Originally published by http://freepress.org.

Finally! The Columbus area ministers who filed a complaint to revoke the non-profit status of the secretive “Family” are to be congratulated. “The Family,” founded in 1935, has a public agenda of promoting “prayer breakfast groups” but their real agenda has always appeared to be preying, not praying. The non-profit behind “The Family” is the Fellowship Foundation. It’s 501(c)(3) mission statement reads: “To develop and maintain an informal association of people banded together, to go out as ‘ambassadors of reconciliation’ modeling the principles of Jesus, based on loving God and loving others.”

At least they’re not hypocrites. At the notorious swinging pad known as the C Street house at 133 C Street, Washington D.C., owned by the Family, U.S. representatives and senators practice their mission of “loving others.” They rent rooms for a reported $600 per month where they stay as “short-term” guests. Most recently one of their Christian brethren, former Congressman and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, was caught up in a highly publicized affair with an Argentinian woman. Also, last year, Congressman Chip Pickering’s wife sued him for divorce, alleging he had an affair “…while living in the well-known C Street complex in Washington D.C.” In June 2009, long-time guest at the C Street complex, Senator John Ensign, also admitted to an extra-marital affair.

In this former convent, once belonging to St. Peter’s Church, members can practice Christian love with foreign and domestic booty. Ensign’s affair was with his former campaign treasurer and the wife of his co-Chief of Staff, Doug Hampton. Although Hampton probably saw it coming, since he was a friend and fellow Family worshipper.

The preference for keeping it “all in the Family” is part of the 10-page complaint filed by the Columbus pastors. The complaint claims that “an exclusive residential club for powerful officials may be masquerading as a church.” The complaint goes on to argue that the activities at the C Street complex “are shrouded in secrecy. Its powerful residents reportedly adhere to a code of silence….This lack of transparency shows a disdain for the political, legislative, and economic accountability that defined constitutional democracy.”

Nothing really new here. Think about the bizarre behavior of Rev. Moon and his crazy Christian Moonies who were tied to the Koreagate sex scandals in the mid-1970s. All of this is documented in the Fraser Committee Report issued in November 1977. It found that the “Moon organization was being used a political tool on behalf of the Korean CIA to influence U.S. politics.” The Moon organization emerged in Ohio politics when they provided key volunteers and resources in John Kasich’s first Congressional victory in 1982.

Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen refers to the Family as “the ‘Christian’ Mafia.” A good starting point for background information is Madsen’s “The Cedars if Arlington” found online at the Wayne Madsen Report.

Whenever non-transparent organizations with codes of silence meddle in national and international politics, we should beware, because booty calls often morph into blackmail. At least we know the agenda of the Moonies – we need to uncover the real agenda of the Family. That’s why the Columbus pastors have done a great service by issuing the complaint against this mysterious Christian “Family.”

To understand Martin Scorsese’s well-crafted psychological thriller Shutter Island, viewers should do an internet search on the following three terms: MK-Ultra, Manchurian candidates, and Operation Paperclip. For the extended value-added search, throw in the combination of “CIA” and “LSD.”

Shutter Island is being released at a very propitious time. Just look at Saturday’s (Feb. 21) front page of the New York Times. Above the fold we have two related stories, the first, under the inaccurate headline “A new report, a new verdict, in terror fight.” A more accurate title would read “U.S. government and Obama administration reaffirm Bush administration commitment to torture.”

The post-World War II U.S. administrations and its rising security-industrial complex covertly embraced torture and secret dosing of unsuspecting people with psychedelic drugs to control their behavior and create assets and assassins during the Red Scare. Now, overt torture done in the name of “fighting terror” has been embraced by the administration of Mr. “Hope and Change.”

The Times announced that the recent government report that exonerated “…the lawyers who gave justification to the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation tactics” officially “…brings to a close a pivotal chapter in the debate over the legal limits of the Bush administration’s fight against terrorism and whether its treatment of Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture.”

This means the first modern nation that banned torture in its Constitution now officially endorses torture by redefining “cruel and unusual punishment.”

J.S. Bybee, now a federal judge, and John Yoo, now a professor at the University of Califormia Berkeley, serve in the renewed roles of Operation Paperclip Nazi war criminals brought to the United States following World War II. There is little difference between Bybee/Yoo and von Braun/Strughold.

Werner von Braun got a pass from being hung at Nuremberg because he was useful in the U.S. military, and later the space, industries. Hubertus Strughold, the father of U.S. space medicine, was directly responsible for the inhumane torture of human subjects at Dachau. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Edward Daniels, was at the liberation of Dachau, and discovered a Paperclip Nazi on Shutter Island continuing to experiment on human subjects, only now with the sanction by the U.S. government. Only a frontal lobotomy will silence his quest for truth.

Our new mass frontal lobotomies come by way of the mainstream media with imprecise headlines and official acceptance of unacceptable government decisions. Torture by any other name, or sanctioned by a memo, is still torture.

The second front page Times article entitled “F.B.I. Shuts Book on Anthrax Case, Fatal to Five in 2001″ gives us the government’s version of “the lone gunman.” Dr. Bruce E. Ivins is a minor-league version of Lee Harvey Oswald. We’re to believe that he, and he alone, sent the trillion-spores-per-gram Ames strain silicon impregnated U.S. military grade anthrax through the mail.

Nowhere in the article will you find mention of Battelle Memorial Institute, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. The Times reported earlier on Battelle’s “Project Jefferson” and “Clear Vision,” and curious characters like William C. Patrick III and Ken Alibeck. Alibeck is the former number 2 man in the Soviet illegal biochemical program who consulted at Battelle with Patrick, another Battelle consultant who wrote a paper on sending anthrax through the mail.

Readers might want to google Battelle, the security-industrial complex’s favorite non-profit, and their Shutter Island-like facility in West Jefferson, Ohio. The FBI originally told the Free Press that they were looking at Battelle in West Jefferson, and the profit motive of a newly-formed company that stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars off of anthrax vaccines.

We’re now to believe that it was Ivins, according to the Times, “a biodefense expert who cast blame on an alternate personality called ‘Crazy Bruce’” and anyone who doesn’t believe this story will be called the “C” word: conspiracy theorist.

Ivins, like Edward Daniels in Shutter Island, had his flaws and makes a perfect patsy for the “lone mailer” theory. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, allegedly stalked two women who were able to confirm that it was “Crazy Bruce,” his other personality, who sent the letters. As the Times dutifully reported, “‘Crazy Bruce,’ who surfaces periodically as paranoid, severely depressed, and ridden with incredible anxiety.”

Just like the movie Shutter Island, there’s a “Rule of 4″ coded message that Ivins left, according to the FBI. The Times noted, that “Ivins embedded a complex coded message in the notes that he mailed with anthrax in 2001. The coded message, based on DNA biochemistry, alluded to two female colleagues with whom he was obsessed.”

So says the FBI; so reports the New York Times. The government also initially denied they brought Nazi war criminals into the United States, and that there was a secret harassment campaign against U.S. citizens called COINTELPRO. And, that they were dosing unsuspecting people with LSD and BZ and other psychedelic and mind-altering drugs. We should all see Shutter Island and shudder at the fact that it’s closer to the truth than we’ll ever get in corporate-controlled newspapers.

http://www.wcrsfm.org/node/779

34 years. It doesn’t even sound like a real number to me. Not when one really thinks about being in a jail cell for that long.

All these years and I swear, I still think sometimes I’ll wake up from this nightmare in my own bed, in my own home, with my family in the next room. I would never have imagined such a thing. Surely the only place people are unjustly imprisoned for 34 years is in far away lands, books or fairy tales.

It’s been that long since I woke up when I needed to, worked where I wanted to, loved who I was supposed to love, or did what I was compelled to do. It’s been that long-long enough to see my children have grandchildren. Long enough to have many of my friends and loved ones die in the course of a normal life, while I was here unable to know them in their final days.

So often in my daily life, the thought creeps in-”I don’t deserve this”. It lingers like acid in my mouth. But I have to push those types of thoughts away. I made a commitment long ago, many of us did. Some didn’t live up to their commitments, and some of us didn’t have a choice. Joe Stuntz didn’t have a choice.

Neither did Buddy Lamont. I never thought my commitment would mean sacrificing like this, but I was willing to do so nonetheless. And really, if necessary, I’d do it all over again, because it was the right thing to do. We didn’t go to ceremony and say “I’ll fight for the people as long as it doesn’t cost too much”. We prayed, and we gave. Like I say, some of us didn’t have a choice. Our only other option was to run away, and we couldn’t even do that. Back then, we had no where left to run to.

I have cried so many tears over these three plus decades. Like the many families directly affected by this whole series of events, my family’s tears have not been in short supply. Our tears have joined all the tears from over 500 years of oppression. Together our tears come together and form a giant river of suffering and I hope, cleansing. Injustice is never final, I keep telling myself. I pray this is true for all of us.

To those who know I am innocent, thank you for your faith. And I hope you continue working for my release. That is, to work towards truth and justice. To those who think me guilty, I ask you to believe in and work for the rule of law. Even the law says I should be free by now, regardless of guilt. What has happened to me isn’t justice, it isn’t the law, it isn’t fair, it isn’t right. This has been a long battle in an even longer war. But we have to remain vigilant, as we have a righteous cause. After all this time, I can only ask this:

Don’t give up. Not ever. Stay in this fight with me. Suffer with me. Grieve with me. Endure with me. Believe with me. Outlast with me. And one day, celebrate freedom with me. Hoka hey!

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,

Leonard Peltier

Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee PO Box 7488 Fargo, ND 58106
Phone: 701/235-2206
Fax: 701/235-5045
E-mail: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Time to set him free… Because it is the RIGHT thing to do.

Friends of Peltier
http://www.FreePeltierNow.org

Who says crime doesn’t pay? Not the V Group, the Voinovich group of companies that specializes in building jails. You see, the Guv’s younger brother Pauly is at it again. His Cleveland-based architectural construction company may be connected to a man under indictment and investigation for alleged “influence peddling.” Seems Vincent Zumpano was indicted on October 3 in Steubenville for allegedly trying to bribe a county commissioner in order to secure a jail construction contract for Pauly’s firm.

Pauly’s company, officially, is “mystified.” And those 473 long distance calls from Vincent’s place of employment to the Voinovich firm between December 1992 and December 1995, as reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer and Cleveland Plain Dealer don’t prove nuthin’. And that’s why the Dispatch has the good sense not to write about it, but chose instead to put on Saturday’s front page aWashington Post wire story about bad sportsmanship among band leaders in Virginia!

More calls went to former employee and lobbyist for the Voinovich firm and the Governor’s original “transition director,” Phil Hamilton. Sound familiar? Remember Joe Gilyard and an Alive cover story six weeks ago about the Gilyard-Hamilton relationship? It’s the same old story, same old song and dance, my friends. Here’s a quick take from Joe, fired by the Guv after he suggested that little brother Pauly may not be on the up-and-up. “This is exactly the type of thing Phil Hamilton wanted me involved in. They used to phone me, fax me, send messages constantly. He wanted me to let the counties know that the V Company had ‘the inside track’ on jail contracts.”

With Governor George’s much-coveted senatorial campaign now only two years away, isn’t it time to pull a Clinton? You know what I mean. Like when Wild Bill let the state police nab his out-of-control cokehead brother Roger. Think about it, Guv. Time’s runnin’ out.

V is for Voinovich
Meanwhile, Pauly continues to “hook us up good” here in Franklin County. You see the architectural firm of Voinovich-Sgro went-without any political influence whatsoever-and got themselves an unbid contract of nearly $1 million to design and manage a $2 million, I mean, $8 million-wait, now $11 million-Franklin County jail renovation.

Our illustrious county commissioners-all Republicans, same party as the Guv, wink, wink, nod, nod-approved the unbid contract last May. Good thing that Voinovich-Sgro is only the architect ’cause if it was the construction manager a 1988 state law would have required competitive bidding, which would have saved millions.

So the cost overruns are really the fault of those really bad construction managers, not Voinovich-Sgro. So much wasted taxpayer money, those bastards. Maybe Voinovich-Sgro could begin to phone and fax those evil construction managers, the Voinovich Companies, every day. I suspect they know the number.

Maybe they could build some special luxury condo cells, you know, like those corporations build at sports stadiums. Then, if Voinovich-Sgro turns in The Voinovich Companies for ripping us off, the construction manager company officials would have a place to stay in the style to which they have become accustomed. Is free enterprise great, or what?

Sybil Hall?
Another one of my favorite county officials is Treasurer Bobbie Hall, universally hailed as a financial whiz. That’s why I take her so seriously when she touts Bob Dole’s tax cut and attacks Bill Clinton as a “big spending liberal.” Reminds me of the movie Sybil with Sally Fields. You remember: Sally did that multiple personality schtick. Hall’s doing the same thing when she suggests that county property owners don’t need a 1 to 2.5 percent discount on our property taxes by pre-paying the bill monthly instead of paying in a lump sum.

Hall recently informed the Dispatch that she looked into the tax-saving program, “but has not seen a need or a benefit to the county’s finances.” Sybil, Sybil? Let me talk to Bobbie Dole, the tax-cutting gal!

Metcalf’s double-dipping

Look for Anthony Celebrezze III to justly blast Franklin County Recorder Richard Metcalf later this week in a commercial on “double-dipping.” Campaign insiders say the initial script is something like-use your best deep political voice-”He’s been on the public payroll for 45 years. He’s making $110,000 a year.”

Yes indeed. Seems a loophole in the law allows the former retired judge and public servant to collect some $60,000 to $65,000 a year in from the Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) while bringing in $50,000 or so as our county recorder.

Look for Metcalf to counter with the usual “He’s got a well-known name and he’s been in office a really, really long time . . .”

Ain’t democracy grand?

As former Sheriff Earl Smith sees it, “That guy in the other paper missed the whole point….I wasn’t obsessed with pornography, we had a health problem, an AIDS epidemic. And when we tried to close the bookstores we ran right into organized crime.”

Referring to a recent front-page article in a local weekly, Smith-who is once again facing off against Karnes for the sheriff’s post-says he doesn’t much care whether people watch triple X videos or read dirty magazines, but he hates the illegal “drugs and prostitution” and money laundering that seem to accompany the porn industry. Of course, the money laundering he loathes isn’t by organized crime, but by the campaign manager for now-Sheriff Jim Karnes’ 1992 campaign.

Greg Kostelac, a local attorney and then a member of the Ohio Elections Commission, claims for the record that he did nothing illegal. But the courts may decide that question. Kostelac apparently took porn money that can be tied directly to organized crime in Cleveland and gave it to the Franklin County Democratic Party. Here’s the rest of the story.

In 1990, then-Sheriff Smith busted an adult bookstore in New Rome. According to Smith, documents seized in the arrest linked local porn czar Mark Wolfe to Ruben Sternum, the mob’s guy in Cleveland: Wolfe had sent a $100,000 check to help post bond for Sternum.

Now comes the 1992 elections. Payback time for the big bad Wolfe. In the waning days of the hotly contested Smith-Karnes race, Wolfe, with the aid of his brother Tom and employee Mark Long, reportedly gave money to six trusted acquaintances: Daryl Castle, Herbert Rogers, Cynthia DeSantis, Joanna Demas, Walt Erwin, and William Joyner.

On October 26, Long, Castle, and Demas wrote $2,000 checks to the Franklin County Democratic Party; one day later Erwin, Joyner, Rogers and DeSantis also each wrote $2,000 checks to the Party. Clean, freshly scrubbed porn money.

The last-minute influx of the $14,000 into Dem coffers set off a heated battle over the money. Current Democratic Party Chair Denny White was running for county recorder that year and his campaign staffers wanted some of the money; Tom Erney and Rob Lidle lobbied hard for a cut for Denny. But to no avail. The Dems, under the leadership of Fran Ryan, “loaned” the Karnes campaign $8,000 on October 30.

Ryan supposedly put the remaining $6,000 into the coordinated campaign effort for all candidates. Kostelac says that $2,200 went into an ad buy at This Week newspapers. The ad was a letter from the Fraternal Order of Police attacking Smith and promoting Karnes.

Kostelac has admitted that the $8,000 loan was used to mass-reproduce copies of Marty Yant’s Columbus Alive! article “Tin Star Tyrants.” At the time, Kostelac was serving as Yant’s attorney in a federal bankruptcy case. On November 23, 1992, after Karnes’ narrow victory, the Franklin County Democratic Party paid him $6,000 for “expenses” reportedly for working on the campaigns of White, Linda Evans, Patrick O’Reilly and other Democrats.

The problem is, Kostelac may not have worked on these campaigns. When Linda Evans was asked what Kostelac did for her Clerk of Courts campaign in 1992, she replied, “Nothing.” White has also stated that Kostelac did not work for his campaign, but says that Kostelac may have had some “arrangement” with Ryan, who paid him. “I just don’t know. It was before my tenure as chair,” White said.

However, it’s an open secret that White staffers exploded when they found out about Kostelac’s expense check. This, in part, may have led to Ryan’s hasty resignation as party chair and White’s ascension. White says no; other party members say yes.

Smith claims that he asked White about the money laundering and White confirmed it, yet refuses to provide the documents “without a subpoena.” White says that Smith called him “over a year-and-a-half ago” and “while I’ve pledged to cooperate with any government agency investigating the party’s activities, I wasn’t going to let Earl Smith go fishing in the Democratic Party files.”

Wise decision. Seems Smith is out to catch the “big one.” And he’s got some questions he’d like answered. “Where did the $6,000 go? Was it income for Greg Kostelac? Was it reported to the IRS? Was it given to Marty Yant for writing the story?” Kostelac says no money went to Yant and everything else was perfectly legal.

Well not quite everything. Cindy DeSantis admits to “doing a favor” for her friend Mark Long, who provided $2,000 in “cash” to be laundered to the Democratic Party. Long, now deceased, had worked for Mark Wolfe. Dr. Joanna Demas admits that Mark Wolfe’s brother “Tom gave me the majority of the money…maybe I was naive.”

And perhaps so was Kostelac, who made the mistake of telling his new running buddy, Terry Casey of Republican Party fame, the naked truth about the porn cash.

The Supreme Court’s atrocious Citizen’s United green light for unlimited corporate campaign spending had a willing accomplice—the American Civil Liberties Union.

Why?

As long-time supporters, we are horrified by the ACLU’s betrayal of political reality and plain common sense.

Standing proudly with the victorious corporate hacks on the steps of the SCOTUS was none other than the legendary First Amendment crusader Floyd Abrams.

Keith Olberman has called him a “Quisling” for aiding and abetting this catastrophic confirmation of corporate “personhood.”

The ACLU has long been the go-to stalwart of First Amendment rights. Its list of accomplishments is long, impressive and essential.

The ACLU has bravely faced divisive, expensive controversy. Long ago it defended the right of American neo-nazis to march through Skokie, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago.

The ACLU has also defended the right of such loathsome haters as the Ku Klux Klan to gather and speak.

In these and other such cases, the ACLU has been right, and has courageously paid a price.

But perhaps the organization has confused those valid First Amendment cases with a Citizen’s United decision perpetrated by the most virulent judicial opponents of individual speech in the history of the Court. In reference to this case the ACLU says it “has consistently taken the position that section 203 is facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment because it permits the suppression of core political speech, and our amicus brief takes that position again.”

We respectfully—but vehemently—disagree. Simply put: money is not speech, corporations are not people.

Given the immense sums of cash these corporations have to spend, the Citizen’s United decision is the equivalent not of guaranteeing individual Nazis the freedom to march, but instead of granting the Party itself the right to drive tanks down the street, guns ablazing.

It’s not the same as giving individual Klan members the right to hold a rally, but rather for the organization to do public lynchings as part of a terror campaign aimed at taking tangible power.

Nowhere in the Constitution do the Founders mention the word corporation. There were a small handful of them at the time of ratification, all strictly limited by state charter to where and what kind of business they could do. They bear scant resemblance to the multi-national behemoths we confront today. Those who wrote and ratified the First Amendment would be horrified by their very existence.

The moneyed power of these corporations and their access to the First Amendment through the myth of “personhood” has been the ultimate pox on American politics since the 1880s.

It has been reported that the ACLU Board is now considering endorsing limits on campaign spending. Abrams has been reported ( http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/25/liberals-vs-free-speech-aclu-e ) as arguing that “The worst thing you could do – the absolutely worst thing you could do – is transform a civil liberties organization into a liberal political organization.”

But this decision has transformed the ACLU into a conservative political organization, working to arm the ultimate enemies of democracy with unlimited monetary and political power.

We are confident the activist community can survive this latest assault on democracy. It will not be easy, but it can be done.

A good first step would be for the ACLU to face reality and now oppose the false claims anti-human money machines have made on our sacred Bill of Rights.

–
Attorney Bob Fitrakis & Historian Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob’s Fitrakis Files are at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Harvey’s History of the US is at www.harveywasserman.com.

The same types of machines that helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000, and “re-elect” him 2004, may now decide who wins the all-important “60th Senate seat” in Massachusetts. The fate of health care and much much more hang in the balance.

As Bay Staters vote to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, most will be marking scantron ballots to be run through easily hackable electronic counters made by Diebold/Premier.

A paper ballot of sorts does come through these machines. But the count they generated was seriously compromised in the Florida 2000 election that put George W. Bush in the White House. Similar machines played a critical role skewing the Ohio 2004 vote count to fraudulently re-elect him.

In 2004, Lucas County (Toledo) Ohio, incorrectly calibrated Diebold scantron machines left piles of uncounted ballots in heavily black districts in the inner city.

The Free Press also found that on optiscan machines in Miami County, Ohio the reported totals were significantly higher than the actual number of people who signed in to vote.

Ironically, the cheated candidate in that election was Massachusetts’ now-senior Senator John Kerry. Kerry is circulating email appeals warning that this election is a “jump ball” in which “shady right-wing organizations and out of state conservatives have descended upon the state in droves.”

But Kerry himself has infamously said nothing about the theft of the 2004 election. Neither he, the Democratic Party, nor the Obama Administration have done anything to change a system in which elections can be stolen by the very-well-funded Republican-owned companies that make and administer the vote-counting machines. A dozen election protection groups from around the country have now issued an “orange alert” warning that the Massachusetts vote count could be “ripe for manipulation.”

Thus Kerry’s new colleague could be “selected” by the same means that deprived him of the White House.

According to Selectman Dan Keller of the western town of Wendell, some Massachusetts communities — including his — do have hand-counted paper ballots.

But most of the state relies on Diebold scantron counters which can be manipulated in numerous ways, including switching calibrations and moving ballots from precinct-to-precinct or county-to-county, thus reversing intended votes from one candidate to another.

According to Brad Friedman at BradBlog (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7650 ) LHS Associates sells and services many of the machines being used in this special election. Though the vast majority of elected officials in Massachusetts are Democrats, control of the vote count can be a grey area where voting machines are involved, especially given Sen. Kerry’s 6-year stupor over the stolen 2004 election, a record of inaction amply matched by the Democratic Party and Obama Administration.

According to Friedman, LHS “has admitted to illegally tampering with memory cards during elections,” and has a Director of Sales and Marketing who has been “barred from Connecticut by their Secretary of State.”

The stakes in this election cannot be overstated. The deceased Senator Kennedy’s seat holds the key to a filibuster-breaking 60-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. State Attorney-General Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, is a supporter of the Obama health care plan, and an opponent of atomic power.

Coakley’s opponent, conservative Republican State Senator Scott Brown, has been running a Tea Bagger-style “populist” campaign.

Poll results differ substantially as the campaign winds down, but all show a close race. Thus Diebold, a thoroughly tainted player with deep Republican roots, could hold the key to the election by shifting the outcome in just a few key precincts.

After internet-based reporting broke the story of the stolen 2004 election, thousands of election-protection activists turned out to monitor the 2008 vote count. Among other things, careful exit polling was done to provide a close reality check on official vote counts. Poll monitors interviewed voters and carefully scrutinized voting procedures and how ballots were handled and counted.

Often overlooked are voter registration manipulations, which were used in Ohio and elsewhere to strip hundreds of thousands of voters of their right to cast a ballot. In Ohio alone, more than 300,000 legally registered voters were electronically removed from the voter rolls between the 2000 and 2004 elections. Most were in heavily Democratic urban areas.

In 2008, the Free Press found that the number of purged Ohio voters jumped to more than a million.

Thus the fact that the electoral apparatus in Massachusetts is apparently in the hands of Democrats may not matter. Private vendors like LHS and Diebold have the actual control over the final numbers.

In Massachusetts, a recount only occurs if the final results are less than half of one percent, and as election reform activist John Bonifaz points out, Massachusetts does not require random audits of the computerized vote counting machines to compare the computer results to the optical scan ballots marked by the voters. Bonifaz notes that in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman Minnesota Senate race in 2008, “everything was ultimately hand-counted.” The problem in Massachusetts hinges on whether the race is close enough to trigger a recount, which candidates can peition for within thirty days.

Exit polls remain the gold standard for election integrity throughout the democratic world. But in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls indicated that the election results were reversed and that Kerry actually won. Jonathan Simon, election integrity expert, points out that the exit polls in 2008 in Minnesota “…had Franken winning by 10%! This is a huge disparity, not remotely reflected by the recount.”

“Could the exit poll have been that badly off? Or could a large number of ballots, 200,000 or so, been swapped out before the recount? Here is where the chain or custody, or lack thereof, comes in. These ballots were not exactly under heavy surveillance during the month-long period between election day and recount completion,” Simon said.

What will matter in Massachusetts is how thoroughly election-protection advocates are able to scrutinize voter certification, access and ballot security. Billions of dollars—and much more—are riding on the outcome of this election. Those who believe it cannot or would not be stolen are simply in denial.

Given the Democratic party’s astonishing lack of leadership on so many issues, it is entirely possible that Scott Brown could legitimately beat Martha Coakley in this election.

But it is also possible that the outcome could be manipulated by the companies in control of the registration rolls and vote counts. It will be up to citizen election protection activists to make sure that doesn’t happen yet again.

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman broke many of the major stories surrounding the theft of the 2004 election, and have co-authored four books on election protection, which appear at www.freepress.org, where they are publisher and senior editor, and where this story first appeared.

President Obama should know that his silence in regards to the military industrial complex is a betrayal of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Rev. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 – exactly one year after, to the day, he profoundly indicted U.S. militarism. Obama unleashed same militarism in his so-called Afghanistan surge. King’s “Silence is Betrayal” speech, given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, denounced “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift.”

In the middle of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the lack of a Green New Deal and jobs programs that make the U.S. less energy dependent are leading to imperial folly in Central Asia. Obama’s popularity erodes as he embraces the same militaristic policies that destroyed President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. As the architect of the War of Poverty, Michael Harrington, used to say, “The War of Poverty was not lost in America, it was lost in the jungles of Vietnam.”

As more than 30,000 new troops pour into Afghanistan, as the government of the United States runs a trillion-dollar yearly deficit, and the annual defense budget approaches $600 billion, not including the $200 billion war budget for Afghanistan, King’s words remain relevant today.

With the U.S. accounting for half of all military spending on Earth and the fact that we could hire every unemployed worker in Afghanistan for a mere $4 billion, we could use the remaining $196 billion war budget to rebuild the infrastructure of the U.S.

The real battles being fought out in the U.S. and in Central Asia echo King’s struggle for economic justice alongside the sanitation workers in Memphis. President Eisenhower understood that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

King, despite his inner search for truth, did not come easily to opposing the politics of the Johnson administration as the Vietnam War raged. King’s great spirit, that seemed to instinctively speak truth to power, feared “the apathy of conformity” in “his own bosom.” King courageously overcame being “mesmerized by uncertainty” and instead, spoke out forcefully.

Dr. King broke the “silence of the night” and found his famously distinct voice, set apart by its universal tone of moral resonance. He looked into the hell-black “darkness that seemed so close around us” and urged people of conscience “to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls ‘enemy’.”

King, like Christ, knew that the Vietnamese people, like the Afghanistani people, are our brothers and sisters. His speech was an attempt to reach out to dehumanized American foes and “hear their broken cries.”

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values . . . a true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, ‘this way of settling difference is not just,’” King spoke.

Looking out into the great waves of history, King observed that, “The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursue this self-defeating path of hate.”

King pointed out, then as now, “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.” There is yet time to draw back from the siege of Baghdad; to say no to the clash of cultures, to end the empty and self-destructive rhetoric of perpetual war in the name of perpetual peace.

If we don’t make that choice, King put it well: “If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.”

President Obama still has a choice today. Thus far, he has chosen to ignore the true legacy of King and pursue the dream of imperial folly.

Original article:
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2010/1801

Find out about the origins of the Free Press back in the late 60s and early 70s.
Socializing with refreshments, art, music, and progressive friends.
Co-sponsored by the Central Ohio Green Education Fund
truth@freepress.org
253-2571

They’re here. Yes, indeed. New evidence published in this week’s issue of The Nation directly links Columbus’s own Southern Air Transport to the Contra cocaine network reputedly protected by the Central Intelligence Agency.

In December 1985, Robert Perry, now the director of The Nation Institute’s Investigative Unit, co-wrote the first news story about Contra drug trafficking for the Associated Press.

After the October 5, 1986 crash in Nicaragua of a Southern Air Transport aircraft that was carrying arms to the U.S.-backed Contras, Perry flew to Nicaragua and copied down the entries in the crashed plane’s flight logs. The entries made by co-pilot Wallace “Buzz” Sawyer, who, along with two others, died in the crash, indicated that Sawyer flew a Southern Air L-382 from Miami to Barranquilla, Colombia on October 2, 4, and 6, 1985.

In 1986, Wanda Palacio broke with Colombia’s Medellin Cartel and became an FBI informant. According to The Nation, Palacio also informed Massachusetts Senator John Kerry that she had witnessed cocaine being loaded onto Southern Air Transport (SAT) planes, an admitted CIA-owned airline from 1960-’73, then under contract to the Pentagon.

On September 26, 1986, Senator Kerry hand-delivered an 11-page statement from Palacio to William Weld, then an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department. Palacio asserts that she was with cocaine kingpin Jorge Ochoa at the airport in Barranquilla in ‘83 as a cocaine shipment was loaded onto a SAT plane, according to The Nation. She claims that Ochoa told her it was “a CIA plane and that he was exchanging guns for drugs.”

Palacio claims in early October 1985 she again witnessed Ochoa’s aides loading an SAT plane with cocaine. She also confirmed to Kerry staffers that Sawyer was one of the SAT pilots she saw loading cocaine in Barranquilla in early October. SAT officials admitted that Sawyer flew their planes, but steadfastly deny involvement in cocaine smuggling.

Not that we would expect them to admit it. On August 7, 1987 in a Senate deposition, Palacio stated that “the FBI stopped working with me all of the sudden because of this Southern Air Transport deal…Justice doesn’t want to hear me.”

With the CIA-Contra drug connection now national news after the publication of Gary Webb’s series in the San Jose Mercury News, and recently reprinted in the Dispatch, questions need to be asked about the use of taxpayer’s money to bring the infamous Southern Air Transport to Rickenbacker Air Base.

Webb documents how the Contra cocaine network spread crack into the inner cities of Cincinnati and Dayton. Evidence suggests that there was clearly a Colombian cocaine connection in Columbus in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In 1990, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department under Earl Smith made the single largest drug bust in its history when they confiscated 48 pounds of cocaine from Fernando Solar.

Solar, according to Smith, led the Sheriff’s Department to New York and an apartment building where vehicles were being compartmentalized for drug trafficking. They issued a warrant for one Carlos Wagner. Wagner was later detained by U.S. Customs Agents who confiscated half a million dollars from him and allowed him to return to Colombia. He was later arrested in Houston when he re-entered the U.S. Wagner turned out to be a “mule,” Smith says, for Colombian drug dealer Rudolphio Trahiellio in San Francisco.

In 1992, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department played a vital role in Trahiello’s arrest in cracking one of the largest drug rings in the U.S. Solar, Wagner and Trahiello are reportedly in prison, but Southern Air Transport remains at Rickenbacker Air Base, courtesy of Ohio taxpayer’s dollars. Why?

Buck up in the September 4 Columbus Alive, I wrote a news article entitled “The High Price of Bucking the System” about the firing of Voinovich administration official Joe Gilyard. Gilyard, former director of the Office of Criminal Justice Services, repeatedly claimed that Voinovich Company lobbyist Phil Hamilton continually pressured him to illegally release money for Voinovich Company projects.

When I asked him why there was so much pressure, Gilyard claimed that “Pauly Voinovich and [the governor's former chief of staff and former Voinovich Companies vice president] Paul Mifsud were in a hurry to repay money to a savings and loan they had busted out.”

Gilyard offered no substantiation. But, a Cleveland Plain Dealer article dated September 8, 1994 provides additional insight. Seems Pauly defaulted on a $6.8 million construction loan for a housing project in 1990, just before Gilyard was appointed. The lender was Columbus-based Mid-America Federal Savings & Loan, which later failed and was taken over by the Resolution Trust Company.

Dale Bissonette, a former chief financial officer of the Voinovich Company, pleaded guilty to bank fraud in connection with the case. Good thing we got Pauly V building the Franklin County jail for $2 million-oops! forgot the overruns-$9 million. Gilyard was fired; Voinovich is at large in Franklin County. Stop him before he builds again.

Door Prizes!
Discussion to follow.
Can the U.S. learn anything from the rest of the world about how to run a health care system? This documentary examines five capitalist democracies and how they do it – each has a health care system that delivers health care for everyone – but with remarkable differences. The countries are the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland and the movie focuses on how doctors practice in each country, universal coverage vs. socialized medicine, and the cost of drugs.

Sponsored by the Free Press, the Drexel, and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund
truth@freepress.org
253-2571

You may be interested in two new items from The Free Press:

The Fitrakis FIles: Cops, Cover-Ups & Corruption – $15
by Bob Fitrakis

In this sixth volume of “The Fitrakis Files,” columnist and investigative
reporter for the Columbus Free Press and Columbus Alive Bob Fitrakis
exposes the corruption that law enforcement officials and politicians
cover up.

http://www.freepress.org/store.php#ccc

Free Press 40th Anniversary 2010 Calendar : $5
Celebrate the Free Press’ 40th anniversary in 2010 with a one-of-a-kind
calendar! Featuring progressive historical events and Free Press newspaper
covers from 1970-2008. Printed on recycled paper.

http://www.freepress.org/store.php#calendar

In peace…

________________________
The Free Press
http://www.freepress.org

Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley

CALL+RESPONSE is a first of its kind feature documentary film that reveals the world’s 27 million dirtiest secrets: there are more slaves today than ever before in human history. CALL+RESPONSE goes deep undercover where slavery is thriving from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India to reveal that in 2007, Slave Traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined.

Luminaries on the issue such as Cornel West, Madeleine Albright, Daryl Hannah, Julia Ormond, Ashley Judd, Nicholas Kristof, and many other prominent political and cultural figures offer first hand account of this 21st century trade. Performances from Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed artists including Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Imogen Heap, Talib Kweli, Five For Fighting, Switchfoot, members of Nickel Creek and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, Rocco Deluca move this chilling information into inspiration for stopping it.

Music is part of the movement against human slavery. Dr. Cornel West connects the music of the American slave fields to the popular music we listen to today, and offers this connection as a rallying cry for the modern abolitionist movement currently brewing. Written, directed and produced by Justin Dillon of the band, Tremolo.

Tickets – On Sale Now! $5 in advance and $7 General Admission/$6 Students at the door. Tickets are available online at www.drexel.net, at Drexel Theatre Box-Office or by calling Samantha Sudai at
(614) 493-7930. Call + Response is presented by Bexley resident & student Samantha Sudai. More information on the film is available at www.callandresponse.com

1021 E. Broad St., parking in front or rear, come to the side door.
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

There can be no greater gift that you can give your loved ones, or the world, this holiday season than Robert Greenwald’s documentary “Rethink Afghanistan.”
While President Barry Obama was busy resuscitating Lyndon Johnson’s “bright and shiny” Vietnam lies in his national address Tuesday night, the American people should instead have been given a more sober assessment by Greenwald as we forge into the valley of fallen empires.

Obama is President primarily because, as a state senator in Illinois, he made a speech opposing the folly of occupying Iraq after 9/11. During his presidential campaign, famed Afghan hawk Zbignew Brzezinski emerged as a key advisor on central Asia. In his book, The Grand Chessboard (1997), Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor makes it clear that controlling the oil and gas fields of central Asia and the pipeline that runs through Afghanistan and Pakistan are the keys to dominating the 21st century.

The joke among hardcore peace activists during the Obama campaign was that Obama had an “exit strategy” from Iraq – sending the troops to Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the American empire proves all too predictable. Obama pitched his strategy as “disrupting, dismantling and defeating” the Taliban, al Qaeda, and extremists. The problem is that the 30,000 troops in Afghanistan will embolden, empower, and resurrect the Taliban, al Qaeda, and extremists.

The U.S military will be no more successful in occupying the difficult terrain of Afghanistan than was the once powerful Soviet Red Army. Every new armed American troop will serve as a recruitment poster for the Taliban. The insurgent strategy is quite simple. Go into a village, fire rounds toward U.S. troops, flee, and wait for the inevitable American military response by artillery, planes, or drones.

The devastated villages that we’re destroying in order to save them, then become prime recruiting grounds for the extremists we claim to be fighting. President Obama is absolutely correct when he says that the status quo in Afghanistan is not sustainable. That status quo includes more than 250,000 war refugees, a government that defrauded the people and stole the last election, massive corruption and drug-running.

We’ve spent nearly $200 billion in Afghanistan, and as Greenwald points out, for $4 billion we could hire the 40% of Afghan people who are unemployed to rebuild their own country. Afghanistan is unsustainable because it’s filled with desperate and poor people who are being occupied by a foreign empire from the western hemisphere, whose chief interest is in the country’s geo-strategic importance in the battle over the central Asian oilfields to its north.

So when the Taliban pays $8 a day to fight the infidels, it’s often the best option available for the war-ravaged people.

Obama argues that U.S. security is at stake in Afghanistan. It’s not. The Taliban, originally supported financially by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and incubated in the madressas of Pakistan, are primarily nationalists who stayed within the borders of Afghanistan. Sure they harbored al Qaeda, but the Taliban is not an international terrorist network. Al Qaeda was, for the most part, because it was U.S. trained and financed to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Occupying Afghanistan because al Qaeda used to be there makes less sense than bombing Florida, New York, and Oklahoma because al Qaeda operatives who attacked us on 9/11 trained to fly there in the 1980s.

The most bizarre part of Obama’s speech was when he told the Afghan people that the United States has “no interest in occupying your country.” But Afghan people know that the armed American soldiers are not coming over to participate in a “hug-a-thon against hunger” and that the high-tech U.S. tanks are not bookmobiles.

Obama seeks to “isolate” those who are killing innocents. Surely he will be successful, since it is the United States with its massive military presence that will be killing the innocent people of Afghanistan, isolating us from positive world opinion.

Obama claims that those of us who argue that this is his Vietnam misunderstand history and points to the 43 nations that are backing us in Afghanistan, implying we were alone in Vietnam. We weren’t. Some of our NATO allies sent troops to Vietnam as did our SEATO allies: Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Also, South Korean troops joined us.

Also, the other similarity is obvious: a corrupt immoral South Vietnamese government that was tied to the drug trade.

Obama once again borrowed from Lincoln and talked about government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In reality, Obama is pitching a war of “volunteers” drawn disproportionately from the ravaged American working class, by a president who was elected in the name of peace, and for a small group of oil oligarchs whose only real concern are the oil and gas deposits in the former Soviet republics just to the north of Afghanistan.

–
Bob Fitrakis is Editor of http://freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

Also, Mark Stanbery has written a draft letter to the editor on the subject. Please use this information and write your own letter to the editor as another outlet to demonstrate the people’s disagreement with the President’s decision:

On the letter to editor, see attached, it is really rough draft with NPP stats of cost of war, “Can we afford this war?” title.
Peace, Mark D. Stansbery

Sample Letter to the Editor: DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT

Can We Afford this War?

The Cost of War in Afghanistan continues to confound people in leadership and on the streets. In tracking the US cost of the war in Afghanistan the ledger must include: an individual cost of war casualty counter, state-level numbers and trade-offs., and Federal Budget Outlays including Supplemental Funding Bills.

Jo Comerford , the National Priorities Project Executive Director, a research organization that analyzes and clarifies federal data, stated that, “With President Obama moving forward with his campaign promise to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, the US public faces two important questions as we reach his administration’s troop escalation: What will be the cost and impact of more troops, for both the US and Afghanistan? And what are the Obama Administration’s long-term goals?”

Seven years ago, the “global war on terror” began in Afghanistan as a military response to the September 11 attacks. In March 2003, the United States also invaded Iraq. Today, US forces are deeply engaged in both countries with some 200,000 US troops in the region, of which 137,000 are in Iraq and about 68,000 in Afghanistan, with the Obama Administration requesting at least an additional 30,000 troops.

Visit www.nationalpriorities.org to access this information and other timely federal budget analysis tools and reports. The American Friends Service Committee can be found on-line at www.afsc.org.

The controversial Libyan leader, who helped train and fund insurgent groups all over the world, now wants to compete in the marketplace of ideas — and he and his supporters think his Green Book may offer a new perspective. One Green Book idea: every citizen is entitled to one mortgage-free house, or tent. That’s the way it is for 5.5 million Libyan citizens.

Following al-Gathafi’s recent trip to the United States, where he spoke for an hour and a half at the United Nations — questioning the assassinations of Kennedy and King — former U.S. Congresswoman organized a delegation to visit Libya and attend the First International Conference of the Green Book Supporters Society.

After a 9-hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany and a 3-hour hop to the shores of Tripoli, I arrived Thursday morning, October 22, greeted by Society supporters at the airport. The 11-member U.S. delegation was whisked off to the Bab-Al Bahre Hotel to mingle with hundreds of representatives from around the world.

But many Green Book supporters were shocked to see an U.S. delegation. We were the first of any note since President Ronald Reagan attempted to assassinate al-Gathafi with F-16 fighter jets in 1986, instead killing his 5-year-old adopted daughter. United States sanctions against Libya were lifted in 2004 and in 2006 the U.S. removed the country from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, but the U.S. has been slow to engage with al-Gathafi. In the meantime, the countries of Africa voted him the President of the African Union and businessmen from China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia have flooded the scenic Mediterranean port city of Tripoli. Construction cranes are everywhere and 2000 miles of undeveloped and unpolluted Mediterranean coastline beckon.

Initially I thought I was in Libya as a reporter, although I began to get suspicious of what was written on my nametag when delegate after delegate asked me for my analysis of President Barack Obama and what was happening in U.S. politics, post-Bush. On Thursday and Friday I worked with the U.S. delegates in drafting a statement of friendship to be read at the conference. It ended: “We know that a better world is possible. We are here to build it in solidarity with each and every one of you, and with our brothers and sisters around the world.”

My thoughts were that if Richard Nixon could embrace Chairman Mao and his Red Book supporters, we can dialogue with al-Gathafi. After all, as the Colonel likes to point out, he was the first man to send out a warrant through Interpol to arrest the terrorist bin Laden.

Journalist Wayne Madsen and I wandered through the old walled city of Tripoli, run-down and hard hit by the U.S. sanctions yet currently being renovated in anticipation of a flourishing tourist trade. Libya is in the process of building the largest airport on the African continent and expects it to be a destination for people from all nations. While we were warned that we shouldn’t be there without an interpreter or guide, we felt safe strolling through the incredible ancient fortress.

Four of us shopped in Tripoli’s central market. Sadly, I found it virtually impossible to buy any authentic Arab wear. Most of the clothes being sold were knock-offs of U.S. styles with names like “Calvin Place,” manufactured in China or Cambodia. Also the ubiquitous satellite dishes offered four English-speaking channels: the BBC, CNN, Fox’s Action Movies, and another U.S. action-adventure channel. I wondered about the wisdom of showering the Libyan people with movies like Mission: Impossible and Rambo Part III.

On Sunday, the conference of 400 or so participants convened. Oddly, a conference organizer ushered me into the first row of VIP-reserved seats, right in front of the Secretary General. I wasn’t sure why. Unexpectedly, the U.S. delegation interpreter asked me to read the Society’s founding charter. Puzzled, I asked why. He replied, “You are the head of the U.S. delegation.” How did I become the head? “Your badge says so,” he told me. In some ways, I figure I’m at fault for not taking basic Arabic in college. Apparently with Congresswoman McKinney representing the North American continent, I somehow became the leader of the U.S. delegation.

It could have been worse. I could have been asked to play ping pong a la China in the ‘70s. During the introduction, I managed to catch the phrase “Green Party Governor Ohio.” Al-Gathafi’s Party is also called the Green Party. I hope there wasn’t some confusion here between the ruling party of Libya and the tattered remnants of aging environmentalists who gave me 1% of the vote in the 2006 election. After giving the speech before a sea of TV cameras, and only occasionally stumbling over the word Jamahiriya (Republic), I improvised by ending with the slogan “All power to the people, all power to the People’s Congress!”

Suddenly they postponed the conference on Sunday and Abdurahmane, our interpreter, told us we were going to meet a special guest. Conference members boarded buses and headed along the seashore highway in Tripoli. The bus pulled into a military compound and we were ushered through heavy security. What else could it be — we were destined to sit in al-Gathafi’s big tent.

I never thought I’d be hanging out in his tent, in a compound with a shrine dedicated to his dead daughter. Once again, I found myself in the front row next to Congresswoman McKinney. Behind me, a man called my name “Ro-bert.” He began “I wrote the statement you gave yesterday. It was the Great Leader’s idea that someone from America should read the speech. You did well but you improvised a little.” I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

Finally, the Colonel came in and we observed a moment of silence for the thousands of Libyans kidnapped and relocated by Italian occupational forces on that day in October 1911. Al-Gathafi spoke for more than an hour. His speech’s theme was clear — corporate capitalism was failing in the West and the Green Book’s version of socialism offered an alternative.

He stressed over and over again that people should actually read his Green Book and not listen to Western propaganda about it. He emphasized that true democracy must be rooted in the religious and cultural traditions particular to each society. He specifically cited the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran as sources for law and democracy. His voice was strong and he spoke slowly. It is clearly legacy time for the aging leader of both Pan-Arab and Pan-African unity.

Why must there be People’s Congresses: “The rich create the Parliament, they own the press.” Denouncing the rich, he stated, “They have a right to steal, you have the right to protest.” Al-Gathafi commented specifically on the United States: “The wealth of society is the property of all Americans and should be distributed that way.”

In our current climate of economic collapse, the ideas in al-Gathafi’s Green Book may make sense to some. Yet, it seems implausible that the great vilified enemy of the U.S. will rise from the ashes of near assassination to influence U.S. politics. Still, who knows? It is intriguing that a robed, revolutionary Bedouin living in a tent in Tripoli seemed to have a more realistic assessment of the U.S. economy and democracy than most of our own elected officials. Next time, let’s let him set up his tent in New Jersey or New York City and maybe a few more people could dialogue.


Original Article Published At:

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2009/1788

Is election reform brewing in the Buckeye State? In an extensive and well-argued editorial the Dispatch made the case for the integration of key state government databases into a statewide electronic voter registration system under the control of the Secretary of State’s office, as proposed in pending legislation.

Ohio’s voter registration databases are in disarray. In the 2008 presidential election, many voters found their right to vote challenged in Ohio because of discrepancies in state and federal databases. For example, under Social Security I am listed as Robert John Fitrakis, but on my driver’s license it’s Robert J. Fitrakis. On the voting rolls I’m Robert Fitrakis. If the states would integrate their databases and establish a single form for voter registration, bizarre challenges over middle initials and names may become a thing of the past.

But privately controlled non-transparent electronic voter registration systems pose a great threat to democracy. Each county keeps its own records, a few have told the Free Press they don’t know how to use the Secretary of State’s data system. Many counties have outsourced their voting rolls to private vendors using secret proprietary software – the same vendors who also own electronic voting machines suspected of manipulating election results.

Ohio purged more than 1,250,000 voters between the 2004-2008 elections. Many of these voters lost their ability to vote because of electronic poll books using proprietary software and hardware provided or controlled by private companies with questionable loyalties. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s Everest study of voting machine security indicated that while the hardware and software connected with electronic voting is vulnerable to hacking, there is virtually no security in place to protect the electronic poll books that contain the registration lists.

In 2004, nearly 10,000 Cleveland area voters learned this the hard way when a Diebold electronic poll book had a supposed “glitch” and purged them from the rolls just prior to Election Day preventing them from voting.

The Dispatch’s logic on several vital points is impressive, although certain safeguards against any centralized database manipulation must be in place. The specter of former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell still haunts Ohio elections.

It is worthwhile to take the Dispatch editorial point by point. The capital city’s daily monopoly begins with an obvious criticism: “Ohio’s county boards of elections spend more time and money shuffling paper around in an outmoded voter registration system than on anything else.” Citing the example of Maricopa County in Arizona, they note that online registration costs are 3 cents per registrant, compared with 82 cents for those registering on paper. The cost saving comes from pushing a button at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and sending the exact same data to the Secretary of State’s office and the county boards of elections versus filling a registration form out on paper, mailing it to both of those entities and having it keyed in.

A key point not mentioned by the Dispatch in this process is that every eligible citizen that registers to vote should be given a copy of that registration by the BMV or, say, the Ohio Dept. of Job and Family Services, which can be used as proof of registration if there’s any dispute when casting a vote.

Paper trails and receipts are a necessity in guaranteeing voting rights. Systems must be in place to assure that central database activity initiated by the Secretary of State must be transparent to the public, and should never be controlled or manipulated by private companies using proprietary software.

The Dispatch editorial was driven by an issue near and dear to the Free Press editorial staff – the unacceptable high numbers of Ohioans who were forced to cast provisional ballots in the last two presidential elections. These back-of-the-bus Jim Crow ballots, as the Free Press has documented repeatedly, are primarily cast by minorities and the inner-city poor.

As the Free Press reported following the 2004 election, “An earlier analysis in the Free Press of the 155,428 unofficial provisional ballots recorded at the Secretary of State’s website found that a clear majority, 85,096, came from the 15 counties Kerry won.”

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/985

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2009/3629

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2009/3630

What the Dispatch editorial fails to note is that a shocking 10% of all Ohio voters on Election Day 2008 were forced to vote provisionally. Provisional voters reached record numbers in 2008 with Ohio reporting 193,000 provisionals cast on Election Day. Election observers noted up to 20% provisional ballots cast in some inner city precincts. Free Press research documented that in comparable battleground states like Missouri and Virginia, very few voters were forced to vote provisional ballots — only .02% (7,000 voters) and 01% (4,500 voters) respectively. Ohio’s numbers are so staggeringly high in contrast, they should be challenged by under the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The Dispatch comes down firming on the side of Ohio public agencies asking Ohioans if they want to register to vote or update their voter registration data. “Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner; Franklin County’s Republican deputy elections director Matt Damschroder, and the Brennan Center for Justice in New York all agree that any Ohio election-reform law should require workers at BMV and Job and Family Services offices to ask clients whether they want to register to vote or have their registration updated…” the Dispatch wrote.

But why stop there? Every public college and university in the state should be required to do the same thing. Last time I checked all the public higher education institutions had computer systems capable of transmitting data. Better yet, all of the public high schools in Ohio should be required by law to ask their students if they want to register to vote on their 18th birthday and transmit that data to the Secretary of State’s office as well as their local board of elections.

Ideally, the solution should be for the state of Ohio, and all states for that matter, to assert an affirmative duty to register all citizens automatically to vote when they are 18 years old. The right to vote should never be taken away from a citizen because a private company controls the poll books or because a partisan political party challenges someone’s identity based on minor discrepancies in a public database.

Join local progressives to meet, network, and socialize, with music, art, food.
Art display by Malcolm J and Paul Wilbur, folk singer, and poets.
Hear about Bob Fitrakis’ trip with Cynthia McKinney to Tripoli.
Showing “Re-Think Afghanistan.”
Co-sponsored by the Central Ohio Green Edudation Fund.

1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in rear.
truth@freepess.org, 614-253-2571

Tuesday, October 27, 2009
7:30pm – 10:00pm
Drexel East
2254 E Main St
Bexley, OH

Filmed over a twelve-month period, from Rochester, NY and Cleveland, to Seattle, Los Angeles and San Diego, WE ALL FALL DOWN also shows how an out-of-control "mortgage machine" has today led to home foreclosures nationwide, featuring interviews with families who have been devastated, as loan defaults and evictions spread from the poor to middle-class sectors of the populace, in turn creating millions of abandoned and disintegrating properties in neighborhoods and cities throughout the U.S. Their emotionally moving stories reveal the all-too-real personal consequences for Americans caught up in this financial spiral.

Click Here for Complete Screening Information Available on the Festival Website

This screening is co-sponsored by the Free Press, the Film Council of Greater Columbus and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund with the Drexel Theater.

http://www.chrisawards.org

After the movie, join us for a musical event:

We have a tremendous opportunity in Columbus, to hear
ANNE FEENEY – progressive singer/songwriter
ANNE FEENEY is a wonderful labor/feminist singer/songwriter in the Woody Guthrie mold (& there ain’t many of those)!! She is someone who doesn’t just write songs about the struggle for justice, she is there, on the picket lines, in the sit-downs, singing for the strikers, marching in the marches and standing up for what is just, regardless of the consequences.
Requested donation: $10.
In her only Columbus visit in many years, Anne will play at:
1021 E. BROAD ST, COLUMBUS, side door, parking in rear
October 20 – 7:30 pm.
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

http://www.annefeeney.com/

Who is Dr. Larry James? A man who in his biography claims responsibility for “Fixing Hell.” Whose hell did he fix? Or did he look the other way while the Devil’s work was done?

Between 2003 and 2007, Army Colonel Larry James served as Chief Psychologist of the Joint Intelligence Group and a senior member of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT). James’ job was advising on interrogation and “behavior management” for the men and kids at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. In 2004, he functioned as the director of the Behavioral Science Unit at the Abu Ghraib prison.

That’s right. His past includes both the notorious Gitmo and Abu Ghriab, the infamous torture site in Iraq.

Having retired from the U.S. Army, James is currently the Dean of the Professional Psychology Department at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. James is licensed to practice psychology in Louisiana, Ohio, and Guam. Human rights advocates argue that Wright State is absolutely wrong in appointing James as Dean because of his questionable past.

Public records indicate that while James served at Gitmo in the spring of 2003, “…abuse and interrogations was widespread and cruel treatment was official policy,” according to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The Center argued that James’ “conduct” at Gitmo should “warrant immediate investigation.”

“Detainee and government reports of abuse during the period of Dr. James’ first deployment include beatings, rape threats, religious and sexual humiliation and painful body positions,” the Center stated.

Under James’ tenure, Guantanamo developed and implemented the Camp Delta “Behavioral Management Plan.” The Plan called for treating new detainees in a way that would “enhance and exploit [their] disorientation and disorganization.” How was this accomplished? Prolonged periods of solitary confinement that are known to cause hallucinations, extreme anxiety, muscular atrophy, weight loss, and other physical conditions that may be irreversible, according to the Center.

While James has denied responsibility, his critics have charged that he used his access to confidential medical records of detainees to target their “physical and mental vulnerabilities.”

At the recent August American Psychological Association (APA) conference in Toronto, the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) handed out fliers with the headline: “Department of Defense Ensures Psychologists’ Collusion in Torture.” Larry James was singled out as one of the psychologists in question.

Both the CCIJ and the CCR called upon the Minister of Public Safety in Canada, Peter Van Loan, to investigate James’ for possible war crimes. They included an 8-page Appendix extensively foot-noted including numerous references to admissions from James’ book, “Fixing Hell.”

The Appendix points out that while James frequently claimed he was reforming things, his actual accounts show he either turned a blind eye to torture, or may have facilitated it.

On page 50-51 of “Fixing Hell,” James writes the following:

“I saw Luther and three MPs wrestling with a detainee on the floor. It was an awful sight. I wanted to run back to my room and wash my eyes with bleach. The detainee was naked except for the pink panties I had seen hanging on the door earlier. He also had lipstick and a wig on. The four men were holding the prisoner down and trying to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown, but he was fighting hard. My first instinct was to rush in and start barking orders at the men, demanding they stop this ridiculous and abusive wrestling match. But I managed to quell that urge and wait.”

James admitted he went to have a cup of coffee and then intervened to urge the interrogators to build better relations with the man being tortured. James writes: “I never once said anything about the lingerie or interrogation. My purpose was to build a relationship with Luther, rather than to attack him as being wrong or as a human being.”

Hell hath been fixed.

When another prisoner was being abused by large MPs screaming in his face for three hours straight, James once again “fixed” hell by suggesting they might want to offer him a drink or a bathroom break.

While James was at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, court records and affidavits indicate that prisoners were not only isolated, but their sleep cycles were deliberately disturbed, they were exposed to extremely hot and cold temperatures, forced to smell unpleasant odors and subject to “dietary manipulations.”

But what does that mean in practical terms? Allegations by one detainee claim that he went for 3-4 weeks without any solid food, living on Ensure and water. Reports by six other high-value detainees allege they were subject to the same liquid diets.

According to the Red Cross report, there was also the use of “prolonged diapering” to force the detainees to urinate and defecate on themselves. They were deprived of using a toilet. Six high-value detainees reported being repeatedly slammed against walls 20-30 times consecutively as an interrogation technique.

If James had the urge to go in and “bark orders” when confronting torture, he most likely had command authority over the torturers at Gitmo. Remember that the standard definition for torture is the deliberate infliction of physical or mental distress on detainees.

Under Canadian law, it is a war crime if any military personnel are found to be “committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Dr. Trudy Bond, a Toledo psychologist, filed an extensive complaint against James with the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists (LSBEP). Bond’s complaint specifically charged that James violated his ethical duties as a licensed psychologist to keep his patients from harm, to protect confidential information, and to obtain their informed consent.

Bond filed her complaint on February 29, 2008. Within a month, the LSBEP chose not to investigate the matter. On June 19, 2008, Bond asked the Board to reconsider. In less than a week, the LSBEP reaffirmed their decision not to investigate.

Bond next turned to the courts, asking the 19th Judicial District Court for the Parish of East Baton Rouge to review the LSBEP’s decision on June 13, 2009. The Court ruled in favor of the Board. On August 6 of this year, Bond filed an appeal with the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeals.

Bond has taken similar action in Ohio as well as with the American Psychological Association. On July 8, 2008, she filed a formal complaint against James with the Ohio State Board of Psychology for, among other things, that James’ conduct is an ethical violation because it “…substantially harmed or is likely to substantially harm a person.”

In her complaint to the American Psychological Association (APA), Bond cited the Report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published after their visit to Guantanamo. The Report documented behavior commonly regarded as torture prior to Bush and Cheney. The rest of the world still defines torture in the traditional sense.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has demanded that medical professionals including James be a “specific focus” of an investigation assessing whether the interrogations violated legal or medical ethics. Steven Reisner of PHR said, “The conclusions that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological practice.”

In a report issued by PHR in 2009, they categorically concluded, that “Health professionals played central roles in developing, implementing, and providing justification for torture.”

While the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have come out unequivocally against the interrogation techniques used at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the APA has waffled on the issue.

In 2005, the APA’s Board endorsed the role of psychologists involved in interrogations as consistent with APA ethics, if it was done for the purpose of making the interrogations “safe, legal and effective.” In 2008, the APA passed another resolution against its members being present in any facility where U.S. and international law was being violated unless they were working for the benefit of the detainees.

James is at the center of this ongoing debate, and now so is Wright State University.

Whether James is qualified to be licensed in Ohio or to be a Dean at Wright State is probably best decided after a careful reading of “Fixing Hell.” One of the most telling passages from the book reads as follows: “Sex was a complicated factor in much of our work at Abu Ghraib. I came to know several single women at Abu Ghraib who got pregnant, received adverse legal action, and were sent home. Private Jenni Nelson was a short, fat, seriously ugly young lady. She looked as though she was crying all the time. Nevertheless, she got a boyfriend, got pregnant, and was promptly sent home by her company commander. Did she do it on purpose to get out of Abu Ghraib? Probably. And I’m sure she wasn’t the first.”

One wonders why Wright State University would hire a man as their Professional Psychology Department Dean who has so little sensitivity to Private Nelson, as well as the prinsoners he was charged to protect. The reality is Private Nelson took action to get out of Abu Ghrai, and not be charged with war crimes. James stayed and wrote a book insulting Nelson and covering-up crimes against humanity.

Was he fixing hell? Human rights advocates say he helped create it for his patients and they are doing everything to hold him accountable for his admitted actions. Bond is currently re-filing an ethics complaint against James in Ohio. There’s an ongoing campaign by the Center for Constitutional Rights called “When Healers Harm” demanding that we “hold health professionals accountable for torture.”

Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the freepress.org and is the author of the forthcoming book, Cops, Coverups, and Corruption.

There’s a peculiar lawsuit pending in Franklin County: Fox Investigation, Inc. vs. Linda Leisure.
Linda Leisure first met death row inmates during her volunteer work as a prison minister in Ohio. Inspired by President Bush’s call for “volunteerism” she worked up the nerve to visit men she feared, yet wanted to help. Not unlike the Susan Sarandon character in Dead Man Walking, she listened to their stories and ministered to their needs.

One of those man’s needs, it turned out, involved helping the wife of death-row inmate John Spirko prove that her husband was not guilty. The Spirko case peaked Leisure’s interest in investigating murder cases. She felt her talents might be better used in ensuring that justice was being done in individual cases rather than preaching to the condemned. Leisure took a job with Fox Investigation, Inc., a private investigating firm headed by Richard H. Smith, an ex-Columbus police officer and an ex-investigator at the Ohio Public Defender’s Office (OPDO). Fox Investigation often did contract work for the OPDO investigating the cases of death row inmates.

Little did Leisure know the reasons why Smith was no longer a cop or state investigator. But she quickly found out why. Soon after going to work at Fox, Leisure claims that Smith “wanted me to falsify time records and interviews on these murder cases.” Appalled, she left Fox Investigation, convinced that certain death row inmates were being denied basic “due process” guaranteed them under the Constitution. And even more frightening, that as a result, some innocent American citizen might be executed. This spurred her into action.

On October 25, 1994 Leisure sent a letter to Common Pleas Judge James O’Grady outlining the above allegations against Smith. On November 14, Leisure voluntarily took and passed a polygraph exam substantiating her charges. But it was politics as usual in the Franklin County Courts and nobody took her accusations seriously, as Smith continued to do business.

Fortuitously, Leisure shared the same attorney as Chester “Briss” Craig, former deputy investigator at the OPDO. Craig informed her that he had been Smith’s boss at the OPDO and had complained to the Ohio Inspector General with similar concerns. In January 1992, Craig charged “…that some of the investigators were turning in false reports and were not providing the support services to the attorneys as required.” Leisure tracked down the state investigative report that essentially verified Craig’s allegations.

The report was none too kind to her old boss, Mr. Smith. During his tenure from April 1983 to November 1988 at the OPDO, Smith was fond of referring to black defendants as “niggers” and white ones as “scumbags.” These “niggers” and “scumbags” were the very clients Smith was hired to work for and investigate their claims of innocence.

Smith told several of his fellow investigators that he didn’t like “working for a nigger,” referring to Craig. Smith admitted in the report that he had arranged for police friends to arrest Deputy Director Craig on a drunk driving charge. “I don’t consider it a conspiracy at all. I was just going to let the man expose himself,” Smith said of Craig.

Speaking of exposing oneself, it turns out that Smith had been forced off the Columbus Police force for doing just that with his most private parts to seven different women, including five minors on October 9, 1981. He had previously been reprimanded many times for various acts of misconduct, including engaging in sex while on duty, and showing up drunk and threatening his ex-wife at her house.

Who was exposing who?

Leisure tried desperately to take the story to the press, with no luck. Depressed and nearly defeated, she picked up a copy of the now-defunct Columbus Free Press, which I edited at the time. She claims God spoke to her and told her that I would publish the story. Who was I to argue with God, particularly when he sends me such a hot story?

Anyway, Leisure’s story appeared on the cover of the January 1995 Free Press. Happy ending? Alas, hardly.

Leisure began to receive harassing and threatening phone calls; someone mailed drugs to her house; and Fox Investigation and Richard Smith sued Linda Leisure for $150,000 in damages due to his loss of reputation. Leisure’s been unable to hold a steady job and had to re-mortgage her home in order to pay an attorney.

After perusing Mr. Smith’s Columbus police files, Leisure’s attorney recently wrote to Smith’s attorney: “Quite frankly, after review of such file, I believe Mr. Smith would have great difficulty proving to a jury that any action by Miss Leisure caused damage to his reputation.” Standard legal principle: one must first have a reputation before it can be damaged.

Leisure was moved by the spirit, driven by her fund.

      

” VERY POWERFUL…. the footage is staggering!  Passionate, exciting and frightening. “  -Roger Ebert

                      “RIVETING ….. a classic espionage tale!”   – Peter Knegt, Indiewire

 THE COVE  starts Friday, October 9 at the Drexel Theatre, 2254 E. Main St.  For more information, Showtimes and
Special Group Discount Ticket Information – contact Drexel Theatres at (614) 231-1050, (showtimes -614 231-9512) or
visit www.drexel.net. 

Special Discount Offer:  Save up to $8 on tickets to see THE COVE  – See the attached
coupon or use coupon below….
——————————————————————
 $2 OFF Any General Admission Ticket or $1 OFF any Matinee(before 6p.m.)
or Student/Senior Ticket.  Coupon valid for up to 4 Discounted Tickets.   Not valid Mondays
or any performance before 12 noon.   Expires 10/22/09.
     PRESENT THIS COUPON FOR ” THE COVE”  TO THE DREXEL THEATRE , 2254 E. Main St.
     SHOWTIMES – (614) 231-9512 or visit www.drexel.net 

——————————————————————————————–

Saturday, October 10
6:30pm-midnight
Free Press Second Saturday Salon
Join progressive friends for food, drink, music, art, and a presentation by CURE-OHIO on:
– the insane over-incarceration in the U.S.
- some of the horrors of the Ohio prisons
- the Parole Board and old-law inmates
- the incredible racial and ethnic disproportion in incarceration
- and what you can do to help!
1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in rear
253-2571, truth@freepress.org

ACORN, more than any other political organization, was responsible for Obama’s victory. ACORN in Ohio, and in key swing states, did what the Democratic Party used to do, but now seems incapable of doing – registering large numbers of low income and working class voters.

Instead of going after the real whores at Chase, CitiBank, and assorted other financial institutions that pimped our system and our people, undercover right wing videographers went for a target that fit their pre-fabricated agenda – a fake Daddy Mac and whore trying to open up a brothel with an ACORN member’s advice. Of course any ACORN people involved in illegal practices should be investigated, as should anyone in the elite financial community and anyone out there misusing federal Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) money.

For that matter, the war criminals in the United States – beginning with Cheney and Bush who committed war crimes, violated the 4th and 8th Amendments by spying on U.S. citizens and torturing people – should be stalked and videotaped whenever possible.

The major reason ACORN has been a target of the Republican Party’s political operatives because it disrupts the strategy put in place by Karl Rove to simply purge as many Democratic voters as possible.

Here in Ohio, the Republican Party led a charge to purge an estimated 1.25 million voters. The GOP attacked black students at Wilberforce, a traditionally black college. They attacked inner city voters in the heavily Democratic wards of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. They attacked students at liberal colleges like Kenyon and students who had gone to major public universities like the Ohio State University and Ohio University.

ACORN was one of the few organizations that was consistently active in the inner city of Ohio’s largest urban areas. Not that there weren’t other voter registration organizations, including the Obama campaign, but the one that asked me to register to vote over and over again in the inner city neighborhood I live in was ACORN.

Recall that Arkansas U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins and Western Missouri U.S. Attorney Todd Graves were fired for failing to go after ACORN during its 2006 voter registration drive. Those responsible for the firing reached all the way to Rove in Bush’s White House.

The National Journal reported that former Bush-Cheney re-election campaign attorney Mark “Thor” Hearne targeted ACORN: “[Hearne]…believed that the U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was not taking seriously allegations that ACORN workers were registering people who did not qualify to vote.”

The Republican sting operation is little more than an extension of the attacks on ACORN in Nevada, Missouri and Ohio in the 2006 election. In 2006, estimates were that ACORN had registered some 1.3 million new voters. The attacks on ACORN, and their contrived nature were revealed at a 2005 hearing before then-Congressman Bob Ney in Ohio, who was later convicted of a felony.

At the federal hearing held in the Ohio Statehouse, Hearne emerged from nowhere claiming to be a voting rights advocate with a front organization called the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). In a classic Rovian scam, Hearne unleashed an unsubstantiated litany of “voter fraud” charges against ACORN and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Among other things, Hearne, who had no history of ever working as a voting rights advocate, told Congressman Ney that voter registration campaigns were used crack cocaine as an incentive for registering new voters. Using the age-old canard of linking a black civil rights and a welfare rights organization with drugs serves the racist stereotypes consistently pitched by right-wingers.

In Hearne’s testimony in Ohio, he also went after the AFL-CIO and Americans Coming Together (ACT-Ohio) as evil-doers involved in “fraudulent” voter registration.

In a March 2005 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, Hearne claimed there was “substantial evidence to suggest potential criminal wrongdoing by organizations such as Americans Coming Together, ACORN, and the NAACP-Project Vote.”

In Wood County, Ohio, the Free Enterprise Coalition (FEC) associated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agreed to back a racketeering charge against the NAACP. After Hearne’s showy press conferences, the suit was withdrawn following the revelation that the plaintiffs were being indemnified by the FEC.

The real issue is the emergence of long-standing southern Jim Crow tactics in key swing states like Ohio. In 2004, more than 300,000 voters were purged in the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. In fact, 24.93% of all voters in the Cleveland area were purges between the 2000 and 2004 presidential election.

If the United States had universal guaranteed constitutional voting rights, ACORN would not be under attack by upper-class white political operatives posing as whores and pimps on their way up the Republican operative ladder.

The small amount of federal money received by ACORN pales in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars in unbid contracts given by Mac Daddys Bush and Cheney to Halliburton.
ACORN is under attack because it is effective and a threat to those forces who wish to disenfranchise millions of U.S. voters. For the most part, Democratic Party officials and their corporate Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) mentors have long ago given up door-to-door inner city voter registration campaigns. ACORN remains as one of the last hold-outs in ensuring the voting rights of millions of forgotten and discarded urban voters.

Bob Fitrakis is the editor of freepress.org. While he’s never worked or been a member of ACORN, in the early 1980s he lived in a house in the city of Detroit that included ACORN organizers.

The ES&S purchase of Diebold’s voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg…

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 24, 2009

Unless U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in 2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation. With 80% ownership of America’s electronic voting machines, ES&S could have the power to shape America’s future with a few proprietary keystrokes.

ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous.

Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.

But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a reliable vote count in the future.

For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold in tandem will still control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign spending, the only difference could be that those who would buy our elections will have to write two checks instead of one.

And in fact, it’s even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful of sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count millions of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who gets to vote and who doesn’t.

Let’s do a quick review:

1. ES&S, Diebold and other companies tied to election hardware and software are owned and operated by a handful of very wealthy conservatives, or right-to-life ideologues, with long-standing direct ties to the Republican Party;
2. As votes will be increasingly cast on optiscans, touchscreens or computer voting machines in the United States in 2010, the scant few so-called paper trail mechanisms that are in place will offer little security against electronic vote theft;
3. The source code on all U.S. touchscreen machines now used for the casting and counting of ballots is proprietary, meaning the companies that own and operate the machines — including ES&S — are not required to share with the public the details of how those machines actually work;
4. Although there are official mechanisms for monitoring and recounts, none carry any real weight in the face of the public’s inability to gain control or even access to this electronic source code, whose proprietary standing has been upheld by the courts;
5. With the newly merged ES&S/Diebold now apparently controlling 80% of the national vote through hardware and software, this GOP-connected corporation will have the power to alter virtually every election in the U.S. with a few keystrokes. Unless there is a massive, successful grassroots campaign between now and 2012, the same will hold true for the next US presidential election;
6. Aside from its control of touchscreen machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S also controls a significant percent of the electronic optiscan tabulators to count cards on which voters use pencils to fill in circles, indicating their vote. Accounts of fraud, rigging, theft and abuse of these optiscan systems are well-documented and innumerable. Any corporation that prints these ballots and runs the machines designated to count them can control yet another major piece of the US vote count;
7. The merged ES&S/Diebold now also controls the electronic voter registration systems in many counties and states. With that control comes the ability to remove registered voters without significant public accountability. In the 2004 election, nearly 25% of all the registered voters in the Democratic-rich city of Cleveland were purged, including 10,000 voters erased “accidentally” by a Diebold electronic pollbook system. So in addition to controlling the vote counts on touchscreen and optiscan voting machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S and sympathetic hardware and software companies that service computerized voting equipment will control who actually gets to cast a vote in the first place.

Lest we forget: in 2000, long before this ES&S/Diebold purchase was proposed, Choicepoint, a GOP-controlled data management firm, hired by Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, removed up to 150,000 Florida citizens from voter rolls on the pretense that they were ex-felons. The vast majority of them were not.

Computer software “disappeared” 16,000 votes from Al Gore’s column at a critical moment on election night, allowing George W. Bush’s first cousin John Ellis, a Fox News analyst, to proclaim him the winner. The election was officially decided by less than 700 votes and a 5-4 Supreme Court vote preventing a full recount. An independent audit later showed Gore was the rightful winner.

In 2004, more than 300,000 Ohio citizens were removed from voter rolls by GOP-controlled county election boards (more than one million have been removed since).

Various dirty tricks prevented still tens of thousands more Ohioans from voting. The vote count was marred by a wide range of official manipulations coordinated by then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Diebold was a major player in the 2004 Ohio elections, but was joined by numerous other computer voting firms and their technicians in “recounting the vote” which confirmed the Bush “victory,” despite exit poll results and other evidence to the contrary. In defiance of a federal court order, 56 of 88 Ohio counties destroyed some or all of their ballots or election records. No one has been prosecuted.

In short, the ES&S purchase of Diebold’s voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg. Voiding the merger will do nothing to solve the REAL problem, which is an electronic-based system of voter registration and ballot counting that is potentially controlled by private corporations and contractors whose agenda is to make large profits and protect the system that guarantees them.

Although elections based on universal automatic registration and hand-counted paper ballots are not foolproof, they constitute a start. Stealing an election by stuffing paper ballot boxes at the “retail” level is far more difficult than stealing votes at the “wholesale” level with an electronic flip of a switch.

As it’s done in numerous other countries throughout the world, the only realistic means by which the U.S. can establish a democratic system of ballot casting and counting is to do it the old-fashioned way. With human-scale checks and balances we might even be secure in the knowledge that our elections and vote counts will truly reflect the will of the people. What a concept!

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, available at freepress.org at, where this article also appears, and where Bob's Fitrakis Files are also available. Harvey Wasserman's History of the U.S. is at harveywasserman.com.]

The Rag Blog

Matt went on from there to be known as “the chauffer” – the guy who drove around and literally wheeled around former Franklin County Republican Party Chair Michael F. Colley. He went from being Colley’s wheel-man to replacing Colley as the Franklin County Republican Party Chair.

From there it was a short hop to the lucrative and politically powerful position as Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. In that post Damschroder came to national prominence during the infamous 2004 election. Readers of freepress.org will recall that Damschroder distinguished himself by purging “felons” that weren’t convicted of felonies from the voting rolls, particularly in Democratic strongholds, as well as shorting voting machines from the inner city black wards.

His partisan actions as Franklin County BOE Director cost John Kerry tens of thousands of votes in Ohio’s capital city. And when the bidding was opened for new voting machines in Franklin County, Damschroder accepted a $10,000 check in his BOE office made out to the Franklin County Republican Party from a key Diebold salesperson, Patsy Gallina. Damschroder was censured and suspended without pay for a month for this breach of ethics. His job was only saved thanks to the intervention of the Democratic Party’s ethically-challenged Chair, Bill Anthony. The philosophy at the Franklin County BOE is that an injury to one election official is an injury to all. Covering each other’s asses, and donkeys, is their code of honor.

Prior to the 2008 election, Damschroder purged more than 300,000 voters from Franklin County’s voting rolls – far exceeding any election official in the state of Ohio. And purging more voters in his county that were eliminated in 2004. Matt Damschroder was forced out by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner two days before the 2008 presidential primary. Damschroder had openly defied Brunner’s directives, particularly one mandating that voters be allowed to vote on paper. Damschroder hung on, as party hacks often do, as Deputy Director.

In a just society Damschroder would be busy repenting in prison. But in the United States, he gets promoted for his incompetence and corruption. Now Matt will be serving alongside former United Nations Ambassador and Senator John Danforth, former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former U.S. Reps Harold Ford, Jr. and Susan Molinari.

The goal of CMVR is to update the voting systems, particularly registration. A key charge to the Committee is to “…register voters automatically while also maintaining safeguards against fraud,” according to the Columbus Dispatch. I guess this is in the long tradition of hiring computer hackers for security and bank robbers as advisors to banks to prevent future thefts.

Ironically, the Columbus Dispatch seems to have missed the articles that contained Damschroder’s scandalous behavior. Mark Niquette, as is tradition, reports the Damschroder appointment as straight news as local boy makes good. Without a hint of sarcasm he writes “Matthew Damschroder is one of two local election officials on the bipartisan committee….”

I figure a few unethical debacles on this committee and Damschroder’s ready to lead the National Republican Party. After all, Rove’s retired, isn’t he?

1021 E. Broad St.
(side door, parking in rear)

Come for the progressive social networking
Have a bit to eat and drink

truth@freepress.org

Swanson holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ConvictBushCheney.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace, a member of the legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice, and convener of the accountability and prosecution working group of United for Peace and Justice.

This event is free and open to the public. Swanson’s new book will be available for purchase and signing by the author. This event is sponsored by the Columbus Free Press and the Progressive Peace Coalition. For more information, contact chammon@columbus.rr.com or http://www.davidswanson.org/book

The struggle and victory to re-open Antioch College as an independent institution separate from Antioch University is a major victory for peace and progressive forces in the United States. On Friday, September 4, Antioch University officials signed a 750-page closing document after 14 months of negotiations to turn Antioch College assets over to the Antioch College Continuation Corp. (read: the alumni).

A group of Greene County citizens recently dropped a complaint filed with the Ohio Attorney General’s office to strip the University of its tax exempt status. The complaint alleged that the University had neglected and wasted the assets of the former College, including severe damage to the historical main building at the Yellow Springs campus.

The Attorney General’s office acknowledged that the withdrawal of the complaint helped pave the way for the final settlement.

The Dayton Daily News reports that the resurrected Antioch plans: “…for a small, first-year class in fall 2010.” The Chronicle of Higher Education asserted that: “Admitting applicants and educating students are at least two years away.” And, Antioch University itself said when it closed the College that it would attempt to re-open it in 2012.

When the increasingly corporatist Antioch University Board of Trustees announced that the College would cease operations in July 2008, it was a stake through the heart of advocates of socially-conscious liberal arts education.

The sooner Antiochian-educated students are injected into America’s body politic the better. In many ways, the little liberal arts college in Yellow Springs has functioned as the conscience of American higher education. Also, it has served as an incubator for virtually every progressive struggle that has improved human rights in this nation.

Mussolini understood in his bid for fascism, that alternative and selfless ideas must be eradicated. He once gave a definition of fascism as “illiberalism” and “corporatism.”

Bruce P. Bedford served on the Board of Antioch University as well on the Board of the Arlington, Virginia company GlobeSecNine. The company was described as possessing a “unique set of experiences in special forces, classified operations, transportation security, and military operations” according to Bear Stearns. Michael Alexander, a former Trustee, founded AverStar whose clients were primarily the U.S. Defense Department and NASA. AverStar merged with the controversial Titan Corporation in the year 2000. Titan, with close ties to the Bush administration, pleaded guilty and paid, at the time, the largest penalty under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for bribery and filing false tax returns in March 2005. Questions have lingered over the role of Bedford and Alexander with their close ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex and the U.S. intelligence community.

At the time of the closing, the Dayton Daily News reported that a $5 million accounting error caused the College to close. Bedford, University records show, served as Treasurer just before the decision was made to close Antioch College.

Recalling Antioch’s history is key to celebrating this victory. The Christian Connection founded Antioch in 1852 and famed educator Horace Mann helmed as president in when it opened its doors in 1853. Mann’s quote: “Be ashamed to die until you win some victory for humanity” inspired the progressive spirit of the school. Antioch College was one of the first mostly white colleges to aggressively recruit African American students in the 1940s and refused to expel students accused of “Communist” leanings in the 1950s. Antioch provided a setting for growing activist movements such as the civil rights movement, New Left, Black Power, and feminism. Antioch students were encouraged to participate in practical work along with their classroom learning.

Former Antioch College faculty, staff, and others continued holding classes while the College was closed in what they called “Nonstop” Antioch during part of 2008 and 2009. Students attended classes at Yellow Springs bookstores, coffee shops, churches, homes, art galleries and even at the Glen Helen Nature Preserve.

An alumni reunion is scheduled for October 2 at the re-born Antioch College. Let us hope that the spirit of the event is that which caused the college to be targeted as a “vanguard of the New Left” under the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO operation. Those who fought to save Antioch have clearly won another significant victory for humanity.

See: Shock, awe and Antioch at freepress.org

–
Bob Fitrakis represented the Greene County citizens group seeking to strip tax exempt status from Antioch University. He is also the author of “The Fitrakis Files” Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis” on the role of the CIA in Ohio politics and the author of the forthcoming volume Cops, Coverups and Corruption.”

But, I was there for his last battle in 1980, supporting him and his United Automobile union allies in Detroit. In many ways, it was the last shoot-out in the Democratic Party between the liberal/progressive forces longing for a return of the New Deal/Great Society and the emerging new pro-corporate Democrats.

Not that the corporatism of Carter and his economic moderation was not offset by his championing of human rights and a rational energy policy, rather those of us who pushed Kennedy in 1980 realized that the “stagflation” – simultaneously high unemployment and high inflation – associated with Carter and the Democrats would likely pave the way for the rise of Ronald Reagan and his politics of deregulation and casino capitalism.

Ted Kennedy would later, during a tribute to the intellectual architect of the [John] Kennedy/Johnson War on Poverty Michael Harrington, call himself a European style “social democrat.” This idea of an America that took care of the least of its brethren and joined the rest of the advanced industrial nations with universal health care was what we were fighting for in 1980.

Harrington, the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, had gone on an early tour to test the waters as a progressive presidential candidate himself. But most of us understood that he was a “stalking horse” for Teddy. Harrington’s frequent trips to Detroit showed that there was tremendous support within the progressive wing of the labor unions for a run by the last remaining Kennedy brother. I had the privilege of chauffeuring Harrington around from meeting to meeting on a few occasions and talking strategy with the likes of the legendary Millie Jeffries and Saul Wellman. The two were once old Left adversaries, but both agreed that Carter had to be challenged within the Democratic Party.

The Michigan caucuses that year came down to who could turn out the most forces. Then-Mayor of Detroit Coleman Young stood strongly with President Carter. The Mayor’s real fear of Reagan, mitigated by Carter’s largesse to the Motor City that at one point reached a 70% match of the entire Detroit budget through various federal grants during 1980 election year, caused him to pull out all stops to deliver the caucuses to the sitting President. The UAW threw the massive political resources of the international union into the caucus fray. Ultimately, it came down to the role of the Associated of Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN), that ended siding with Carter in exchange for delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Sadly, the ACORN forces were some of my closest allies and the political commune I lived in and partially owned at 12749 Kilbourne on Detroit’s east side often was referred to as “ACORN East.” That summer ACORN’s interns and students sent from Minnesota by a little-known college professor, Paul Wellstone, worked out of my house.They continued to do so through 1984.

I remember what appeared to be a scuffle in the New York delegation during the 1980 Democratic primary where Harrington was accused of blocking Carter delegates from speaking. We fell a few delegates short at the convention, and from putting forth our dream of a resurrected Camelot. I stayed away from the Democratic convention, instead organizing demonstrations in Detroit at the Republican convention where not only Ronald Reagan was nominated, for the former CIA director George Herbert Walker Bush emerged as his Vice President.

It was the last gathering of the New Left tribes and the 60s countercultures. I worked very closely with the San Francisco Mime Troupe who were organizing the “:Reagan for Shah” committee. I played the role of a young Republican pleading with Reaganites to have Reagan declare himself Shah and get rid of the liberals who were ruining the country. I few were quite drunk and sympathetic saying, “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

I regretfully sat out the Carter campaign in 1980 and instead worked for Barry Commoner and the People’s Party. I recall the slogan, “The 5% Solution.” If we could just get 5% of the vote, we would have a real environmental worker’s party on the ballot. Like the dream of a re-born Camelot, the structure of American politics has long worked against a viable left-wing third party.

Still, I can’t help but wonder these days as I ponder the life of Ted Kennedy and his tremendous perseverance in the U.S. Senate during the dark days of Reagan and Bush who were both elected in 1966 to public office for the first time. Voted in as enemies of the Great Society, the New Left, and the 60s counterculture, they represented a violent reaction against the idealism of the 1960s.

Kennedy remained the last and greatest idealist of the 60s. Even during the hell-black night of Bush the Second. Let us pray that his death inspires Barack Obama and others to rekindle the dream that endured with Kennedy physically and hangs heavily in the air as we mourn his passing.

Another politically bleak week: trade gap widens by 43 percent; credit card delinquencies hit a record high; but violent crime goes down 9 percent. Yet Bill Clinton and Bob Dole continue to run for district attorney instead of president. It’s just the real national problems like trade policy and stagnant household income that they’re clueless about.

Ask them about drugs and crime, boy, do they have answers. Desperate for political hot-button issues, they bellow: “lock ‘em up, beat ‘em up, kill ‘em quicker, more cops, fewer civil liberties….”

Dole wants to double prison spending-must have been talking to the Brothers Voinovich. I wonder if Paul Mifsud is still working for his campaign? Dole also called for more “drug news.” Here’s some: 85 percent of drug addiction is legally prescribed.

Ask Chief Justice Rehnquist, Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan, Kitty Dukakis, Elvis, etc. In the early ’80s, high school kids used to work themselves into such a frenzy at the “Just Say No” clubs that they had to go chug a beer just to cool down afterwards. Clinton wants to spend $700 million for “the largest anti-drug effort in history, “but he won’t give the Congressional Black Caucus an answer on whether he backs an investigation into the CIA’s (aka Cocaine Importing Agency) involvement with crack trafficking in the inner-cities of the U.S.

An American institution
Speaking of crime, the Pentagon finally released documents showing that U.S. Army training manuals used at the notorious School of the Americas advocated executions, torture, coercion, blackmail, and other God-fearing American tactics against Third World insurgents. Yes, indeed, our U.S. tax dollars at work abroad.

We, as a people, are responsible for our drug-running, murdering, and torturing government. Sorry, that’s the way democracy works. We are paid to train and “educate” most of the Western Hemisphere’s most heinous butchers. Like “Blow Torch” Bob D’Aubuisson who was the leader of El Salvador’s right-wing death squads, the Salvadoran soldiers who assassinated six Jesuit priests in 1989, and “our man in Panama” General Manuel Noriega.

Recently, the largest-ever protest occurred at Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the School of the Americas. Four hundred and fifty people-including 300 Catholic nuns-converged on the main gate and called for its closing. Believing “The Truth Cannot Be Silenced,” 13 U.S. citizens remain in prison for willfully and openly trespassing at the School in the finest tradition of civil disobedience.

As for President Clinton, the White House recently called the School “a force for good and not evil.” Hey, did I tell ya how they pioneered that really thin highly conductive wire that could be inserted in the penile shaft like a catheter and hooked to any portable military field telephone? Just a few cranks of the field telephone and your average Third World non-white Native American-type starts telling you everything you want to know. You usually don’t even have to torture him all that long to get information. Must be what the President means by a “force” for good.

Cliff and Jim
Enough bleakness, there’s still some heroic Americans fighting the good fight. Cliff Arnebeck, probably the most decent and thoughtful candidate in central Ohio this year, is once again calling for real Congressional campaign finance reform. Arnebeck is Deborah Pryce’s Democratic opponent in the 15th district.

Arnebeck, Tom Erney and I are all part of a lawsuit against the state of Ohio with our lead plaintiff, former Republican Congressman Clarence Miller. Our suit argues that it’s unfair for the Democratic and Republican parties to draw up the Congressional districts to favor their party’s incumbent Congressperson. Take for example, Franklin County: the state legislature created two relatively safe Republican districts by dividing the Columbus voters into two separate districts and attaching overwhelmingly Republican rural counties like Delaware, Licking and Union. If the city of Columbus had been left intact as a Congressional district, we’d actually have a competitive Congressional race this year. In Cleveland, they created a black minority district that votes 84 percent Democratic. And they call it “democracy.” We’re arguing that a non-partisan body should draw up Congressional districts in a fair and impartial manner. Whoa, is that radical or what?

Worthington School Board member Jim Timko continues his fight against the lock-step majority on the board. Timko refused to bow to community pressure and instead acted on his own conscience. He believes that former Worthington Kilbourne student Max Seeman “didn’t do anything wrong” in sitting during a senior pride rally. At least nothing so evil as to require a police paddy wagon to remove Max from the school and his suspension.

“The message it sends is we’re going to do everything we can to control your behavior,” Timko stated. “You don’t understand the Worthington mentality. ‘We don’t make mistakes.’ That’s what the school board is saying, and that’s wrong.”

Timko is consulting with one of the state’s leading civil rights attorneys to discuss his options following his September 9th censure by his fellow board members. He admits to being “flabbergasted” after the “junta” voted four to one for censure. And well he should.

The Worthington school board is going to have a hell of a time explaining to a judge how they offered a completed resolution of censure and disapproval, and issued a prepared statement on the resolution behind Timko’s back. Can you say violation of open meetings law? Can you say violation of Sunshine Laws? Obviously, the paddy wagon came for the wrong people. The board is acting criminally, not Max Seeman.

What the hell is Cynthia Ruccia thinking? Ruccia, running for Congress in the 12th district against John Kasich, held a press conference last week questioning the Congressman’s living arrangement with a male aide in Washington. The Dispatch justly portrayed her desperate attempt to “out” Kasich as a descent into the “gutter.” What the Dispatch failed to note is that they pioneered such “gutter” politics against Kasich a few years back when they essentially used the same tactics.

If you remember, Johnny-boy was meeting with Hillary Clinton over the health-care issue in the pre-Newtonian days. The Dispatch ran a front page story describing the townhouse that John and his aide lived in and the lovely grilled fish prepared for the First Lady. Hugh DeMoss and I shared a laugh at the time over the Dispatch’s all-too-obvious displeasure with Congressman Kasich.

Although I disagree with Congressman Kasich on virtually every public policy issue, I believe his personal relationship with his aide or any other consenting adult is none of our business. Unsubstantiated gossip has nothing to do with political issues. And even if there was an ounce of evidence, what’s her point? One would expect more from Ruccia, a Democrat who decries the same tactics and moralizing from the far right.

Last time I wrote about Ruccia in a feature story suggesting the obvious-that the presence of longtime Democrat and former school board member Bill Moss was hurting her campaign-her attorney contacted Columbus Alive.

Her contempt for the First Amendment and her unprincipled attacks on Congressman Kasich should be rejected by the voters. Someone should have steered her away from the Mike Stinziano School of Campaigning.

Betty’s boop
Dog ate my homework, computer crashed, copy machine broke down. Just when you thought you’d heard all the lame excuses, Ohio’s Attorney General Betty Montgomery manages to take incompetence to the highest level. The Plain Dealer reported that Ms. Montgomery missed her deadline in a key court case because her copier broke. The good news is that the case involved Betty and the Guv’s attempt to foil Ohio’s Open Records Law by having state bureaucrats claim attorney-client privilege. Basically, they were creating a way to keep important or embarrassing information from the public. The Open Records Law is the state equivalent of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). These post-Watergate, so-called “Sunshine Laws” are indispensable checks on government corruption. We use the FOIA and the Open Records Law a lot at Columbus Alive.

The bad news is that she’s our state’s attorney. ” …and the line was too long at Kinko’s, honest!”

Out of the mouths of babes
It’s getting really weird in Worthington. The case of Worthington-Kilbourne student Max Seeman, who was hauled off in a police paddy wagon at the request of Principal Dianna Lindsay, continues to cause consternation. Much to its credit, This Week in Worthington reprinted the transcript of Seeman’s disciplinary hearing. The transcript clearly shows that Max was removed for not standing-even though he wasn’t required to stand-during a mini-version of a Nuremburg-style senior pride rally.

Well, seems at least one Worthington School Board member understands the difference between a police state and an educational environment. School board member Jim Timko called for an investigation of the incident in a letter to This Week. His authoritarian-worshipping colleagues on the school board immediately passed a resolution of censure and disapproval. They demanded that he not release confidential information, that he not speak on behalf of the board, and that he abide by the first two points or resign.

“They wanted to intimidate me and create the impression that I did something wrong,” Timko said. He said that his colleagues get elected and do “whatever the administrators want.” Their attitude is “we don’t make mistakes in Worthington,” he continued.

They accused him of violating confidentiality by responding publicly about the incident. Supposedly, his utterances as an elected official about a hearing purposely opened to the public by the parents of Max Seeman, with Channel 4 in attendance, somehow violated confidentiality.

Key point, Timko did not violate the confidence of the board by responding to a newspaper story. No one told the other educational jackboots on the Worthington board that something has to be a secret first to be considered confidential. Perhaps it was a breach of idiocy. He wasn’t dense enough to be on the Worthington school board.

On the plus side, students in Worthington Kilbourne’s American Radicalism class requested a discussion on the issue between Dr. Lindsay and Joan Seeman, Max’s mother. They must be reading too much Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Abe Lincoln.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2009
7:30PM
Drexel Theater
2254 E. Main St., Bexley

A POWERFUL NOISE
Hanh is an HIV-positive widow in Vietnam. Nada, a survivor of the Bosnian war. And Jacqueline works the slums of Bamako, Mali. Three very different lives. Three vastly different worlds. But they share something in common: Power. These women are each overcoming gender barriers to rise up and claim a voice in their societies. Through their empowerment and ability to empower others, Hanh, Nada and Jacqueline are sparking remarkable changes. Fighting AIDS. Rebuilding communities. Educating girls.

Sponsored by the Free Press, Drexel Theater, Film Council of Greater Columbus, and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

Give me a ticket for an aeroplane, ain’t got time to take a fast train
– since the Republicans destroyed mass transit in the U.S. and there
aren’t any fast trains – Ken Blackwell just wrote me a letter. That’s
same Blackwell we all now known as the Katherine Harris of Ohio for his
role in helping steal the 2004 election. Blackwell, billing himself as
“Former Ohio Secretary of State” and “Conservative Republican,” wrote a
letter regarding: “The One Way to Stop the Obama Machine.”

My first thought to stop the Obama “Machine” was – take cell phones
away from 18-24-year-olds. After all, the Obama political machine was
actually a decentralized cyber-force of youngsters. All of this
brilliantly captured in Danny Schechter’s recent documentary: Barack
Obama: People’s President.

Blackwell addressed me as “Dear Fellow Conservative.” This is perfectly
appropriate since I believe in the Bill of Rights, particularly the 8th
Amendment that forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” Thus, in order
to preserve these traditional conservative values, I’d like to have a
grand jury investigate Bush and Cheney for torture and assorted crimes
against the Constitution and then prosecute them.

Blackwell began the letter by asserting that he was a “clear and
present danger” to the “Democrats.” Why? Because he “threatens
self-appointed black leaders, the Democrat Party machine, and even
Barack Obama’s grip on power.” Blackwell particularly takes offense to
the fact that Al Sharpton “…flew into the state to racially slander me
by calling me Ken Whitewell” during his ill-fated run for the
governorship of Ohio.

I understand Blackwell’s outrage and how out of touch Sharpton is with
the people of Ohio. Blacks here were referring to him as “Ken
Blackhell” and election activists as “Ken Hackwell.” How dare Sharpton
make a reference to Blackwell’s race simply because the black
conservative spent his time kissing Bush buttocks? Also, Sharpton
failed to point out that Blackwell’s favorite past-time paid real well
and was steady work.

Blackwell claims these evil Democrats “…have gone out of their way to
destroy me and other black Republicans like me.” I wondered why the
Dems would waste their time to “destroy” one person, because who else
is like him? And who cares? But Blackwell had gotten my attention.

Blackwell sees himself targeted because he stands “on principle.” Fair
enough. His principles happen to be opportunism, corruption, and
cronyism. But he has displayed a principled commitment to these values.

Blackwell’s always been a man of principle. First, when he was a
left-wing black nationalist in the 70s. And then, when he was a charter
reform progressive Democrat out of Cincinnati. And then when he was an
Independent, and again when he became a Jack Kemp help-the-poor
kind-hearted conservative. And finally when he was a Steve Forbes
help-the-poor-by-giving-money-to-the-rich Republican. Also, he was
perhaps most principle when he appeared before white supremacist groups
in Ohio and elsewhere and campaigned with far-right born-again
Christians like Rod Parsley. I guess it’s not hypocritical or
opportunistic to hang out with people that want to lynch blacks and
believe all Muslims will burn in hell (See “Why is the man who stole
Ohio campaigning with a white supremacist?” by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman, October 9, 2006 at
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/217).

Still, the highlight of Blackwell’s letter was his ranting against
Obama’s “Big Brother government.” It’s fair to concede that Blackwell
knows a lot about Big Brother. He served as the UN Human Rights
Ambassador for former CIA Director, and then President, George Herbert
Walker Bush. So, we gotta give him his props. He associates with people
(for example George Walker Bush and Cheney) who know about torture,
unconstitutional and illegal domestic electronic surveillance, and
overthrowing democratically-elected governments. No wonder they wanted
him to be Ohio’s Secretary of State.

To be fair to Blackwell, he did have major accomplishments as Ohio
Secretary of State. He allowed 24.93% of all voters in Cleveland,
Ohio’s major Democratic stronghold, to be purged prior to the 2004
election. Many voters thrown off the voting rolls had been registered
in majority black precincts.

And he does know a little about money. Blackwell and three friends took
a $500,000 investment, hooked up with Carl Lindner, the Cincinnati
billionaire, and parlayed it into a nearly $200 million investment in
radio. Of course, Blackwell’s role as State Treasurer and the deposit
of large sums of Ohio tax dollars into Lindner’s banks played no role
in Blackwell’s success, according to Blackwell. Essentially, Blackwell,
with no radio experience, got rich off the Clear Channel franchise and
mergers.

Blackwell is thrifty – outsourcing Ohio’s 2004 election count to
private companies like New Media, Triad, and Smartech – so the actual
statewide vote count could take place on Republican servers tied to the
White House in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (See “Behind the firewall: Bush
loyalist Mike Connell controls Congressional secrets as his email sites
serve Karl Rove” by Bob Fitrakis, July 29, 2008 at
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2008/1665).

I was so inspired by Blackwell’s letter and his plea for money, since
his Black Republican PAC is “Our best chance to stop the socialism of
the Obama presidency.” Blackwell clearly prefers the
welfare-for-the-rich socialism of the Bush administration where nearly
a trillion dollars was given to failed corporate investment bankers as
opposed to the Obama, where nearly a trillion dollars was given to
failed corporate investment banks. (See “Democratic Socialists?
Democrats not half that good” by Bob Fitrakis, May 24, 2009 at
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2009/1746).

I took up his challenge to respond within “96 hours.” Whew, I barely
got this in with an hour or so to go. Blackwell’s right – I should send
whatever I can spare, $35, $50, $75…– to a cause I can believe in.
Maybe I’ll send a check to the Single Payer Action Network (SPAN)
because I want health care reform or to All Aboard Ohio working to
bring a fast train, for that matter any train service, to Columbus,
Ohio.

Bob Fitrakis is the editor of freepress.org and also ran for governor
of Ohio in 2006 on the Green Party ticket.

As the axiom states: “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” Strange and interesting things are happening in the legendary swing state.

First, it was Fox commentator, former Congressman, and originally freshly-scrubbed Nixon youth John Kasich emerging as the likely Republican nominee for governor of the Buckeye State.

Then, former U.S. Senator Mike Dewine announced his candidacy for Ohio Attorney General on July 22. In 2006, the then-incumbent Dewine lost to Democrat U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown by 12 percentage points, although final polls throughout the state showed him losing by twice that amount.

Why would a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives – granted he was most well-known for falling asleep during the Iran-Contra hearings – and U.S. Senator, be seeking the seemingly lesser office of Ohio’s chief law enforcement officer?

The answer is: he would be chief law enforcement officer in one of America’s most politically corrupt states – sort of New Jersey without the reputation. Historically, the Attorney General of Ohio has been the key position for covering up the state’s systemic corruption and two-party pay-to-play system.

Back in 80s, Ohio’s Attorney General was none other than Billy Joe Brown (original name: Barone) whose major political backer was Eddie DeBartolo, Jr. DeBartolo is most well-known as the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers who was forced to sell the franchise after pleading guilty in a alleged scheme to bribe the former governor of Louisiana to secure a gambling license. Columbus police records indicate that DeBartolo has ties to organized crime and was a “person of interest” in a high–profile murder case in Columbus back in the 80s.

What Brown understood is that the Attorney General’s office is a good place to harass political enemies, dispense patronage, and cover up questionable activities by your cronies. The current Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray – most famous in Ohio for being a 5-time Jeopardy winner – has a well-deserved reputation for being squeaky clean and ethical.

Prior to Cordray, Mark Dann of Youngstown held the office briefly before being forced to resign amidst a sex scandal. Dann’s Attorney General’s office became a great place from which he and his appointees could shake women down for booty. Dann won, in part, because of the support of the election integrity movement which was hostile to Republican Attorney General James Petro, who went out of his way to thwart lawful Ohio Supreme Court supervised examination of the conduct of George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and Ken Blackwell in connection with Ohio’s infamous 2004 Presidential election.

What kind of Attorney General would Dewine make? Perhaps the best testament to Dewine’s character is in a piece written by Joe Gilyard, a former state cabinet member as Director of Criminal Justice Services during the Voinovich administration. Gilyard, a well-known Republican political operative recounts how he served as “Dewine’s hired gun” when he ran as Lieutenant Governor on the Voinovich ticket: “I was to protect him [Dewine] from sharks like Chief of Staff Paul Mifsud and even Governor Voinovich himself.” The late Mifsud was a former military intelligence officer and close friend of George Herbert Walker Bush, who ran his Ohio presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1988.

Mifsud would later serve time in jail related to falsification of government records in a contract-steering and bribery scandal. Early on, when Gilyard tried to blow the whistle on the corruption of Paul Mifsud, Dewine pledged his support. “…he thought Mifsud was a crook and we should go after him,” Gilyard wrote.

In order to go after Mifsud and Voinovich, Gilyard and Dewine would have to first clash with another legendary friend of George H. W. Bush, Franklin County Sheriff Earl Smith. Both Smith and the late John Walton Wolfe of Columbus’ politically-formidable Wolfe media conglomerate, used the Columbus Dispatch to go after Gilyard.

Dewine was openly and easily intimidated from the fight. As Gilyard colorfully recalled the story: “He [Smith] hurled invective upon invective on a now squeamish Mike Dewine, going so far as to call him Mike DeWeeny in the press.” The name stuck.

Gilyard wrote an eight-page memo about Smith’s activities that were under investigation by federal authorities. The memo was given to Mike Dewine, according to Gilyard. “He [Dewine] stood up, face whiter than usual, and said, ‘This meeting is over. Please put all your memos on the table.” Gilyard alleged that Dewine demanded all copies of the memo showing corruption by Smith and the Voinovich administration in order to cover up any investigation.

Gilyard admitted that “I went back to my office and destroyed everything except a hard copy and the disk. I took them home and secured them in case I needed them to prove my innocence in what had become a Machiavellian plan to steal $30 million in state bond money, give the Voinovich Company an ‘inside track’ to all county jail-building contracts and allow Earl Smith to escape from justice again.”

All of this is documented in a CICJ Books book I authored called “The Brothers Voinovich and the Ohiogate Scandal.”

Dewine, rather than stand up to the obvious corruption of the Voinovich administration, instead ran for the Senate because the heat was too hot in Columbus.

Now, Mike Dewine wants to return to Ohio’s capital city and be the state’s chief law enforcement officer. He originally denied that Gilyard ever wrote a memo outlining the corruption of the Voinovich administration. Gilyard lost his job after his photo appeared on the front page of the Wolfe-owned Dispatch newspaper portraying him as a criminal based on charges brought by Earl Smith, although Gilyard was later acquitted of all charges. Stress and high blood pressure had wrecked his kidneys.

Under pressure from the state’s inspector general, Dewine later found a copy of the memo in a vacation home desk vindicating Gilyard. But it was too late for Gilyard.

It’s hard to believe how corrupt the Voinovich-Dewine administration was in the early 90s. During those years, the terrorist/Al Qaeda-connected, now discredited Bank of Credit and Commerce International helped finance a toxic waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio as the regulatory wheels were greased by the Voinovich family.

Governor Voinovich’s brother Paul was paid $6000 a month retainer to lobby on behalf of the incinerator. Another money source for the incinerator was the notorious Swiss corporation Von Roll, a company that was busted for trying to sell a “supergun” to Iraq to lob nuclear warheads at Israel.

This massive corruption is what the spineless Mike Dewine escaped from by running for U.S. Senate. Now the man known for looking the other way when corruption runs rampant wants to be Ohio’s chief law enforcement officer, just in time to look the other way for the 2012 Presidential election.

Bob Fitrakis edits freepress.org and was one of the lawyers attempting to conduct the investigation of Bush, Rove and Blackwell in Ohio’s 2004 election.

The death of former Philippine President Corazon Aquino on August 1, 2009 should be remembered for many reasons: not just because she led the People Power revolution in the Philippines that stood for peace and human rights, and not just because she did it after the brutal Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos had her husband assassinated, but most importantly, she stood up to one of the first documented stolen elections.

While the American mainstream media steadfastly refuses to recognize the use of both computer hardware and software in modern election manipulation, President Ronald Reagan’s good buddy Marcos immediately knew the score with the new technology and blatantly used mainframe computers to rig his 1986 election. With the support of the Reagan administration, Marcos simply had the vote count shut down until “new tapes” were brought in that reversed Aquino’s victory.

All of this was captured on the nightly news, and more tellingly, in Hedrick Smith’s book The Power Game and the video he did called “The Power Game: The President.” The video documents the role of Senator Richard Lugar complaining to the world that somebody was cooking the numbers on the election computers. Fortunately for Aquino, most of the election workers walked out rather than accept the rigged election.

Not the case in Ohio in 2004. And coincidentally, August 2 marks the fourth anniversary of the death of the Reverend Bill Moss. He was the lead plaintiff who sued to overturn the 2004 Ohio presidential election. A key difference between the people of the Philippines and most of those in the U.S. is that the Philippine people took to the street in a general strike after the election was stolen.

The corruption of the Marcos regime was well-established, including the bullet to the back of Corazon’s husband Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. when he returned from exile in the U.S. to ask for a democratic election. Recall Marcos had him assassinated right on the tarmac at the airport.

Yet, were the dealings of the Bush administration any less blatantly corrupt? You had the coup in Florida in the 2000 election, followed by the illegal occupation of Iraq, and the blatant embracing of torture and other violations of human rights before the eyes of the world. So, when Bush crony J. Kenneth Blackwell privatized the 2004 Ohio election bringing in private companies like Triad, Diebold, New Media, and Smartech – and the exit polls all indicated unprecedented vote theft – it was Moss who led the charge.

The election integrity movement remains to evolve into a real people power movement that will wrest control of the computer software and hardware from the private vendors with direct ties to the Republican Party and the CIA-connected Bush family.

This weekend we should honor our election integrity heroes who have passed. The wondrous “ordinary housewife” Corazon Aquino who became the 11th president of the Philippines and beat back Reagan’s version of the U.S. as an evil empire, and Bill Moss, the man behind the Moss V. Bush lawsuit in Ohio that resulted in the first challenge to a state’s entire electoral college slate in U.S. history.

There is much work to be done. But much inspiration in the legacy of Aquino and Moss.

Bob Fitrakis is the freepress.org Editor and was one of the four attorneys in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit.

A Sense of Wonder
Rachel Carson’s love for the natural world and her fight to defend it

When pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, the backlash from her critics thrust her into the center of a political maelstrom. Despite her love of privacy, Carson’s convictions and her foresight regarding the risks posed by chemical pesticides forced her into a very public and controversial role. The film is an intimate and poignant reflection of Carson’s life as she emerges as America’s most successful advocate for the natural world. Sponsored by the Free Press, Sierra Club, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and Drexel Theater.

Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley
253-2571 – truth@freepress.org

The United States has produced several mythic historical figures – Paul Bunyan, John Henry and the like – but our actual prophetic peace activists are actually far more interesting. People like Eugene Victor Debs, Emma Goldman, and in our present day, Cindy Sheehan.

Myth America: 10 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution places Sheehan firmly in the pantheon of progressive heroes. Myth America is an online book by Sheehan geared towards destroying the military industrial and security industrial complex that killed her son Casey in the corrupt war in Iraq.

Sheehan is calling for re-localization and the uncoupling of the “robbed class” from the war profiteers and new high-tech robber barons that are flourishing under globalization. The beauty of Sheehan’s work, directly echoing the speeches and writings of Debs, is its sheer bluntness.

I interviewed her for freepress.org, and she began by pointing out that “the last month or so in Iraq does not show that the war is winding down, and that part of Obama’s plan to withdraw from the cities in Iraq simply involved redefining the border of the city.” She termed the so-called withdrawal “painfully slow.”

“The peace movement has been co-opted by the Democratic Party,” Sheehan said, while on her way to a national gathering of peace activists in Pittsburgh on July 10. She ran a Congressional campaign in the Democratic primary last year against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and raised the issue of Pelosi being aware of the practices of torture and waterboarding.

Sheehan favors the appointment of an independent special prosecutor to look into the issues of torture and war crimes in Iraq. She is well aware that if you begin digging up facts concerning the practices of the Bush administration following 911, you’re going to “pull up some Democratic skeletons as well.”

Sheehan argues that it’s necessary to dig up all the bodies and bones or there’ll be “no healing.”

In one sense, Sheehan is both old-fashioned and cutting edge – she uses the appropriate term in discussing U.S. foreign policy – “imperial.” When asked she believes current U.S. policy is imperialist, she replied “Of course.”

But her focus is more on re-invigorating the peace movement at the local level, which she says is doing a “bad job” under the Obama administration. Make no mistake, Sheehan sees the current imperial policy of the U.S. reflected in a domestic “class war” as well. The book poses a key question: “What can the vast majority of Americans do as the “robbed class?” She recently wrote: “The so-called Ship of State that ‘turns slowly’ cannot turn at all if the rudder keeps pointing in the direction of economic piracy for the Robbers and economic pillage for We the Robbed.” This populism from below sentiment has usually been a harbinger for large-scale social economic movements, from the original Populists to the Socialists, Wobblies, progressives and New Leftists.

Her new book analyzes the relationship between the U.S. government and the six or so transnational media corporations that control 80% of the world’s for-profit content. Sheehan’s strategy is to avoid the Robber Class corporations as much as possible, whether its through publishing e-books and articles on the internet, or re-allocating one’s capital in a different direction.

Sheehan’s pitch is to free ourselves from our co-dependency with the Robber Class. “…Only buy used, only use cash or bank debit cards, or only buy from local merchants,” she recently wrote. They can only steal from us if we enable them.” And when the Robber Class steals from us they generally get away with it. Sheehan argues that Bernie Madoff was punished so severely because he stole from the rich.

Sheehan’s book is a plea for the robbed class to take back their independence and the wealth that they produce, not only for their own good, but for the good of all the people on the planet.

Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of freepress.org and the author of The Idea of Democratic Socialism in America and the Decline of the Socialist Party.

NOTE: Cindy Sheehan is speaking in Columbus on Monday, July 13 from 7-9 pm at the Ohio at the Central Ohioans for Peace meeting at the Columbus Mennonite Church, 35 Oakland Park Avenue, Columbus, Ohio.

For four years the Free Press and other community groups like
the Central Ohio Green Education Fund and Ohio Honest Elections
have brought together progressive activists on the second Saturday
for socializing, music, progressive films, activist presentations, art,
refreshments and organizing.

Saturday, July 11, 2009
6:30-11pm
1021 E. Broad St. (side door, parking in rear)
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

A Parlor with Clint Curtis
Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 7:30 PM
at the Hanna House
1021 E. Broad Street Columbus, OH 43205
Free to the public

A personal, one on one, opportunity to speak with Clint Curtis: brought to you by
the Central Ohio Green Education Fund and the Columbus Institute of Contemporary Journalism and the FREE PRESS

Clint Curtis was an everyday computer programmer in Florida until he was asked by a powerful Republican legislator to create vote-rigging software for electronic voting machines.

Comfest events:
Free Press Workshop
Saturday at the Shelterhouse
June 27, 2009 from 2:00 to 3:00
“Perspectives on Indicting Bush and Cheney”
Bob Fitrakis – Columbus Free Press, Anita Rios – Ohio Green Party, John Quigley – International Law Professor OSU, Clint Curtis

ComFest Free Press Saturday Salon
Saturday at the Solar Stage
June 27, 2009 from 3:20-4:10
“Peoples Tribunal on the Indictment of Bush and Cheney”
Moderated by Bob Fitrakis
Special Guest Anita Rios, john Quigley and Clint Curtis

If you want to help volunteer at the Free Press wine booth during Comfest, please email: truth@freepress.org

Iran’s Ayatollahs have just admitted that in some 50 cities there were as many as 3 million more votes cast than there were voters in the recent presidential election.

But, they say, that’s not enough to change the outcome. So, like Florida in 2000 and Ohio 2004, there will be no total recount and no new election. Election theft should be opposed, whether it’s sanctioned by a supreme Ayatollah or the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s as if the Iranian government is being advised by Ohio’s former Iman J. Kenneth Blackwell, who, as Ohio’s 2004 Secretary of State, purged hundreds of thousands of voters, and stole, switched and disappeared enough votes to put George W. Bush in the White House for a second term. The dubious Iranian tallies look very similar to the inflated Bush outcomes in 12 Republican southwest Ohio counties, most notably Warren, Clermont and Butler. They are reminiscent of the vote counts in two precincts in Perry County that reported turnouts of 121% and 118% of registered voters.

The chief difference between Iran 2009 and Ohio 2004—and Florida 2000—-is in the opposition. Iran’s Mir Hussein Moussavi has vowed martyrdom.

John Kerry, trailing in Ohio by just 130,000 votes with more than 250,000 yet to be counted, walked away less than 12 hours after exit polls showed him a clear victor.

Gore fought a little, but instead of embracing martyrdom, opted for boredom, and for making sure there was no challenge in the US Senate to the votes stolen.

Nationwide, Bush’s alleged 3 million-vote nationwide margin in 2004, and 600 votes in Florida 2000, were as fictional as those ballots the Ayatollahs now admit should not exist.

Moussavi believes he has a date with destiny. But Kerry apparently had one on the golf course. Gore’s failure failure to effectively respond in Florida 2000 remains an inconvenient truth.

Blackwell, Florida’s Jeb Bush and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard used registration tampering, disinformation, intimidation and fraud to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters before the balloting.

Blackwell and Bush then used a lethal mix of black box machines, faulty scantrons and hijacked ballots to finish the job. Blackwell worked with Diebold, ES&S, Triad, and other electronic magicians that let him disappear or switch all the votes he needed with a few keystrokes at around 2am election night. His high-tech IT henchman, Michael Connell, has since died in a mysterious plane crash.

The Times seems to finally understand the problem. In their July 22 editorial, “How to Trust Electronic Voting,” they argued the following: “In paperless electronic voting, voters mark their choices, and when the votes have all been cast, the machine spits out the results. There is no way to be sure that a glitch or intentional vote theft – by malicious software or computer hacking – did not change the outcome. If there’s a close election, there’s also no way of conducting a meaningful recount.”

Saddled with paper ballots that may or may not still exist, the Iranian authorities have simply trashed the whole election. “I don’t think they actually counted the votes,” one observer told the New York Times.

Because the American people did not take to the streets in the Iranian model, our democracy was subverted.

Thanks to Kerry and Gore, the public follow-up in Ohio and Florida was ineffective. As in Iran, the primary reporting has been largely limited to the Internet. The results—8 years of George W. Bush—speak for themselves.

But in the US, a nationwide election protection movement has arisen that protected the results in 2008, and that could make all the difference for the future of American democracy.

The Iranian people are speaking for themselves, and for the finest principles of democracy. For confirmation and inspiration, they need only look at America 2000-8 to see the consequences of an unelected government.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES are at FreePress.org, where this article first appeared. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE U.S. is at www.harveywasserman.com.

The parallels between the stolen Iranian election of 2009 and the American of 2000 and 2004 are tempting. The histories—and futures—of the two nations are inseparable. Bound up in their tortured half-century of crime and manipulation are the few glimmers of hope for lasting peace in the Middle East.

In both countries, a right-wing fundamentalist authoritarian with open contempt for human rights and the Geneva Convention has come up a winner, with catastrophic consequences. In both countries, the blowback of two George Bushes loom large.

In the US, two “defeated” candidates—Al Gore and John Kerry—said and did nothing in the face of two stolen elections. But an unprecedented election protection movement arose from the ashes of those defeats to assure the 2008 victory of America’s first African-American president.

In Iran, the “defeated” candidate—Mir Hussein Moussavi—is fighting back, along with massive grassroots resistance. How far they get will define the Iranian future—as well as that of the Middle East.

In a fluid and unpredictable situation, here are some indisputables:

1) A half-century ago, the people of Iran attempted a democratic revolution led by a moderate progressive, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, whose social-democratic inclinations have been revived by Moussavi.

2) Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown by the Eisenhower Administration and its Central Intelligence Agency, which wanted to wall in the Soviet Union and protect western oil interests.

3) Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. (father of the Gulf War general of the same name) used a suitcase full of US taxpayer dollars to bribe Iran’s anti-democratic sympathizers and help overthrow Mossadegh.

4) They installed the pro-U.S. general Fazlollah Zahedi, who handed control of Iran to the brutal and vicious Shah. The Shah ruled through the infamous secret terror/torture police force Savak, which Schwartzkopf helped train.

4) A prototypical CIA asset, the Shah used his iron torturer’s hand to “westernize” the country and make it more user-friendly to US oil interests.

5) Among other things, the U.S., France and other western powers were moving to provide the Shah with up to 36 atomic power plants designed to provide electricity and, ultimately, radioactive materials with which to build his own atomic bombs.

6) Despite his ostensible commitment to human rights, President Jimmy Carter made a point of spending a high-profile New Year’s with the Shah, evoking the bitter hatred of millions of Iranians.

7) The Shah’s overthrow by fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini led to the 1979-80 hostage crisis that finally sank Carter’s presidency. Amidst indications of a secret deal involving past and future CIA Directors George H.W. Bush and William Casey, the release of the hostages was delayed long enough to guarantee Carter’s defeat, thus inaugurating the Age of Ronald Reagan, with 12 of its 28 years under the two Bushes.

8 ) Secret dealings between Reagan/Bush and the Iranians led to the Iran-Contra Affair, when covert operatives like Oliver North funneled arms to the Iranians and laundered cash and drugs through the reactionary Contra forces fighting revolution in Nicaragua.

9) The Contras in turn flooded the US with cocaine, feeding a horrific crack epidemic that has crippled the black and Hispanic communities here for two decades.

10) Those US-financed arms were used to fight the Iraqis and Saddam Hussein, whom the US also supported, and whom Donald Rumsfeld publicly embraced in the early 1980s. The American goal seems to have been to weaken both Iran and Iraq through a horrifying war that claimed at least a million casualties, ultimately infuriating both citizenries.

After a half-century of dictatorship under the Shah and the CIA, followed by the Ayatollah and the fundamentalists, the Iranian public appears desperate to return to the social-democratic vision of Mossadegh, denied so long ago.

In the US in 2000 and 2004, the corporate/religious right put George W. Bush in the White House—and then kept him there—with a sophisticated election theft machine built around elimination of voter registrations, manipulation of the vote count, and a wide array of supporting tactics. The US Supreme Court set it all in stone with its infamous Bush v. Gore decision, which prevented a true vote count in Florida 2000. History repeated itself in Ohio 2004.

In Iran 2009, the ruling fundamentalist elite has barely pretended to count the votes at all, merely rushing to announce a prê-determined outcome. The reigning Ayatollah has played the role of the US Supreme Court by certifying the outcome before a real ballot tally could possibly occur. Holes in the texts of Iranian newspapers and an electronic blackout created by official censors reflect the on-going vacuum in the US corporate media, which has yet to seriously face up to what happened to the American elections of 2000 and 2004.

What will happen next in Iran is anyone’s guess. George W. Bush fueled its fundamentalist right by calling it a “terror state” whose nuclear weapons ambitions are fueled with materials produced by the “Peaceful Atom” Eisenhower inaugurated in 1953, around the time he was disposing of Mossadegh.

Bush’s counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is now turning the state terror apparatus—reminiscent of the Shah’s—against those who would mention the illegitimacy of his rule.

Thus tragedy looms at the brink of opportunity. That democracy in Iran so clearly won at the polls is a sign of great courage and hope on the part of the Iranian people. They are fighting terrible odds, not of their making. Should they break free, the storm would re-shape the Middle East—and much more.

In the meantime, perhaps their American counterparts, instructed by the ghost of Mossadegh, might finally face up to the true price of sowing such cynical, lethal whirlwinds.

–
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES are available via www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.harveywasserman.com.

Former Chair of the House Budget Committee John Kasich of Ohio formally declared his candidacy for governor of Ohio June 1, 2009. His timing could not have been worse. As a Congressman, Kasich championed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and worldwide free trade. Now he announces for governor of Ohio, as General Motors files for bankruptcy. It will be interesting to see how Kasich, who focused recently on eliminating Ohio’s income tax, plans to explain how his free trade policies that sent tens of thousands of Ohio jobs to Mexico and China will help the state weather what looks more and more like a Depression.

With over 10% of the state’s labor force officially unemployed, Kasich will also have to explain his ties to the bankrupt and defunct investment banking firm Lehman Brothers. After leaving Congress in 2000, Kasich took a job as managing director of the Columbus, Ohio investment banking division of the company. Kasich, like the assets of Lehman Brothers, ended up with the British banking firm Barclays.

So, while Kasich’s candidacy has that 1936 Alf Landon for President disaster feel, he should not be counted out first and foremost, because of the Fox Factor. As the former host of the neo-hokum “Heartland with John Kasich” show and a frequent guest host filling in for Bill O’Reilly on the “O’Reilly Factor,” Kasich is a political celeb with his own propaganda machine.

Moreover, in his early political campaigns, Kasich was aided by followers of the self-proclaimed Messiah, Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Moon’s ties to the Washington Times, the UPI, and other publications, could serve as an asset to Kasich as well. Moon’s past history of passing money to Republican Party candidates may also prove beneficial.

With his Wall Street and Moon connections and celebrity status, Kasich could claim the Statehouse in a floundering economy where Governor Ted Strickland often appears as a paralyzed moderate with little vision to initiate a green revolution in the state. If President Obama’s stimulus fails to stimulate the Buckeye State economy, Kasich’s “maverick” image as a budget cutter may appear as a fresh and wholesome alternative to economic stagnation.

Kasich, a 1974 graduate of The Ohio State University, frequently stresses his blue-collar background and his father who worked as a postman. Both of his parents were tragically in a 1987 automobile accident which Kasich has spoken and written about. He’s authored two books Courage is Contagious and Stand for Something: The Battle for America’s Soul. The genre they best represent is re-worked Horatio Alger rags to riches myths.

Kasich is running for governor in 2010 during Congressional off-year elections. A victory in Ohio, our nation’s great barometer state, would indicate future problems for President Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.

Republican State Senator Kevin Coughlin of Cuyahoga County is also seeking the Republican nomination for governor.

The Democratic Party pre-empted Kasich’s announcement by leading an onslaught against him as the “candidate of Wall Street.” The Ohio Dems can also take solace in the fact that Kasich’s 2000 run for president was a certified debacle. He withdrew early after achieving status as perhaps the Republican’s leading non-entity in the field.

Kasich will no doubt stress the fact that the budget was balanced in the years he chaired the House Budget Committee. Here Kasich can claim he worked with Bill Clinton to stimulate the economy and restore fiscal responsibility.

While the Dems blast Kasich’s Wall Street connections, Ohio’s Republican Party Chair Kevin Dewine is busy attacking Gov. Strickland for the loss of 300,000 in Ohio. Their theme is that the Democrats committed to fix economy, but it’s just getting worse. “The only Ohioan who deserves to lose a job in this economy is the guy who promised to turn it around and failed miserably,” Dewine said in a statement.

Still, Governor Strickland’s popularity remains high and President Obama’s even higher. Yet, those numbers may begin to fall if the hope of real reform and change is seen as empty campaign rhetoric rather than the reality of a new high-tech sustainable Buckeye economy.

–
Bob Fitrakis is Editor of freepress.org, is a political theorist, ran against against Kasich for the 12th District of Congress in 1992 and ran as a Green candidate for Governor in 2006. This article was originally published by http://freepress.org.

The Republican National Committee recently dropped its resolution to brand the moderate pro-corporate Democratic Party “Socialists.” As the late, great Democratic Socialist leader Michael Harrington liked to tell it when he testified before a dying Senator Hubert Humphrey on the Humphrey-Hawkins Work Bill, that would theoretically guarantee every American a right to a job, Humphrey bluntly asked him “Is my bill socialism?” Harrington replied, “Senator, your bill’s not half that good.”

Here’s why the Democratic Party is also not half that good. Obama’s “Me too” bailout policy to the largest and most irresponsible banks and investment houses has nothing to do with socializing capital. Democratic Socialists believe in democratizing and socializing money matters. They favor credit unions and co-ops with democratically elected boards over large welfare checks to transnational corporations. In fact, there’s little difference between Obama’s approach to the big bankers and George W. Bush’s.

If the Democrats were European Democratic Socialists or Social Democrats, they would have never allowed 20% of all U.S. workers and 47 million people in the U.S. to live without health care. They would have at least called for a general strike to shut down the system until the injustice was stopped.

If you want to look at the history of democratic socialism as a barometer for that esteemed label in American history, let’s start with the legendary Eugene Victor Debs. Unlike the cowardly Democratic Party and its then-leaders – John Kerry and Hillary Clinton who both supported Bush’s illegal imperialist occupation of Iraq to remain politically viable as presidential candidates – Debs went to jail to oppose World War I.

Not only that, he ran as a Socialist Party presidential candidate from jail and received a million votes defending the First Amendment. What was Debs’ great crime? Claiming the rich have always declared war and the poor and working class have always fought and died.

Historically, U.S. Socialist leaders like Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington were not cowards hiding behind pragmatism and popularity polls. When virtually no U.S. politicians spoke on behalf of accepting Jewish immigrants from Nazi Germany during the Great Depression, Thomas fought for their admittance.

Martin Luther King, Jr. called Norman Thomas “the bravest man” he ever met. When Thomas gave his nominal blessing for the last remains of the Socialist Party to merge into the Democratic Party in 1960, he did not surrender his conscience. For example, he called John F. Kennedy “all profile and no courage,” particularly in regards to the President’s civil rights actions. In 1965, Thomas spoke at the first major anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington D.C. and announced he had come to “cleanse” the American flag, not to burn it.

Thomas spoke out and wrote a book against the torture of pacifists during World War I, asking the key question, “Is conscience a crime?” He understood that when you strung pacifists up by their thumbs, it was torture. I’m sure if he had ever been briefed on it, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi allegedly was, he would have denounced it immediately.

Michael Harrington was the architect of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. His book, “The Other America,” stands as a lasting monument to the principles of Democratic Socialism. When both the Democrat and Republican Parties were ignoring the 22% of U.S. population living in poverty during the Eisenhower years, it was Harrington who documented their desperate plight.

Harrington later went on to champion the rights of the wretched of the Earth in his book “The Vast Majority.” He helped write the policy perspectives that tilted the European Social Democrats toward massive aid to Africa, Asia and South America.

Debs, Thomas and Harrington came to realize that democracy was more important than socialism and that decision-making from the bottom up was the key. To label the timid, triangulating Obama Democratic Party as Democratic Socialists is absurd. Not only is Obama not half as good as Debs, Thomas and Harrington, he’s not yet a pale imitation of FDR. And we can only dream that he would adopt the infrastructure programs and progressive tax policies of President Dwight Eisenhower from the 50s.

Perhaps the best we can do is raise the slogan demanding that Obama “Be like Ike.” America needs a Marshall Plan, that’s something an FDR or Ike would understand. Debs, on the other hand, would be calling for an army of a million men to arrest Bush and Cheney for crimes against humanity. And Debs would be talking about his desire to resurrect from the dead the more than a million dead Iraqis killed in a corporate capitalist war for oil.

That’s the legacy of American Democratic Socialism.

Bob Fitrakis, Ph.D., J.D., is the editor of the freepress.org and author of The Idea of Democratic Socialism in America and the Decline of the Socialist Party which is for sale at the freepress.org online store.

As hundreds of our hard-earned billions are being poured into corrupt, greed-driven, lethally inefficient banks, the Administration, Congress and corporate media have studiously avoided the one sector of the banking industry that actually works—the credit unions.

Throughout the United States there are hundreds of these people-powered banks that have succeeded and prospered while all around them the traditional banking has collapsed into ruin, taking our general economy with them.

Why?

Because unlike those private banks, the America’s 10,000 not-for-profit credit unions are controlled by the people who deposit their money there. Loans are made only to members. The deposits are federally insured, and investments are monitored by the depositors and, allegedly, by federal regulators.

For the most part, their decisions are made democratically. Their boards of directors are elected. Increasingly those decisions have been oriented funneling resources into new green industries whose future is bright, and that actually serve that public rather than raping it.

To be sure, there are those credit unions that are plagued with problems. Like all institutions, they all have their flaws. As creatures of the democratic process, they are capable of making wrong decisions while driving those involved stark raving mad.

But by basic mandate, credit unions are ACCOUNTABLE, a concept almost completely lacking from those mega-banks “too big to let fail.”

In fact, Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget contains $234.6 billion in Community Development Financial Institution funds. Some $113 billions is earmarked for “financial issues in underserved communities,” according to the Treasury Department, along with another $80 million for the new Capital Magnet Fund aimed at “enhancing investments in affordable housing opportunities for the very poorest Americans.” This money, says a May 7 Treasury Department release, “should be a boon to Credit Unions.”

The numbers are a great improvement over the Bush era. But they pale alongside the torrent of cash slushing into failed private banks.

Since the founding of the first true credit unions in Germany beginning in 1852, the institutions have spread throughout Europe, India and North America. The first came to the US in New Hampshire in 1909.

Edward A. Filene, the Boston merchant whose famous basement offered bargain clothing to working people, Basic principles include the idea that only members can borrow money from a credit union, and that the loans must be “prudent and productive.” Because loans involve the money of a close-knit group, and must be approved by members whose money is at risk, the credit unions are a model of how the banking system might be remade.

On average about 10 of the nation’s 10,000 credit unions fail each year. Because depositors’ money is federally guaranteed, they may lose their bank, but not their deposits.

Ohio election officials purged more than a million voters between the 2004 and 2008 elections. The number is three times that of voters purged between the 2000 and 2004 elections in that key swing state.

The Free Press Election Protection Project requested data from Boards of Elections in all of Ohio’s 88 counties. A detailed analysis of the records reveals shocking and unprecedented purges. The total number of people whose names were removed from the voting rolls is a stunning 1.25 million.

The Ohio data shows enormous disparities in the number of people purged in different categories from county to county. These results suggest obvious violations of equal protection and due process. The documents demonstrate that the voting rights of a million Ohioans were destroyed based on the arbitrary whims of local election officials. Purging appears to be subject to widely diverse interpretations of state and federal laws by different Ohio Board of Elections officials.

Despite being the only organization in Ohio to conduct a statewide study of voter purges, Free Press staffers were not invited to present the results at the second statewide Ohio Election Conference convened by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner in March 2009.

One of the study’s most troubling findings was that Hamilton County knocked 37,465 reported felons off the voting list. The next largest number came from Franklin County, which is larger than Hamilton County, with 2,174. Hamilton County became infamous in the 2004 election for wrongly telling former felons that they weren’t eligible to vote unless a judge signed off. Ohio uses the “in/out” rule in regards to felons: those in prison cannot vote; those out of prison can vote, even if on probation or in a halfway house.

Hamilton County’s felon purge constituted 80% of all Ohio’s total. In the past, some counties mistakenly purged people only indicted, but not convicted of felonies. After a Free Press investigation, Franklin County admitted to this practice prior to the 2004 election.

Those suffering a “mental incident” can be purged as well, especially in Fayette County. Out of 307 voters stripped of their voting rights because of psychological problems, 283 were from Fayette County – more than 92% of the state’s reported total.

Altogether, 220,000 voters were purged due to death or moving. There were 137,550 voters who moved from one county to another and were justifiably eliminated as they were merged into their new county’s voting roll. Another 93,178 voters deleted due to death, leaving more than a million eliminated for other or unknown reasons.

The largest single purge category, with 228,799 voters, was “failure to vote.” In Franklin County, home of Columbus, led the way with 116,000 purged voters – 51% of the total eliminated for not voting.

“Failure to vote” may have a different definition depending on which Ohio county you ask. Some counties purge if a voter fails to vote in federal elections for eight years straight. Other counties purge after failure to vote in federal elections every four years.

Only 47 Ohio counties offered specifics on the reasons for purging. Other counties simply reported a non-categorized total number of purges in response to the Free Press records request. The Republican stronghold of Warren County purged more than 52,000 people without explanation and Democratic Lucas County, home of Toledo, purged more than 24,000 for unknown causes. Many of Ohio’s counties refused to comply with the Free Press’ records request until after the election, and some complied only after legal pressure from the Secretary of State’s office.

Ohio does not have a uniform system for keeping track of purged voters. Shelby County and the historically corrupt Mahoning County refused to comply with Ohio’s public records law and provided no records. Sandusky County, despite assurances from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office that there is a statewide computer database linked to all counties, informed the Free Press that they only had paper records available for inspection on site and were incapable of transmitting electronic data.

One of the difficulties discussed at the March Election Conference is that there’s no statewide system for coding purges, making it unclear which counties remove people for death, felony conviction, failing to vote, or failing to respond to a notice from the Board of Elections.

Statewide Free Press Election Protection Project coordinator Connie Gadell-Newton noted in her preliminary assessment, “…even though a whopping 1.25 million records were removed, this doesn’t mean that 1.25 million people were disenfranchised or that 1.25 million individual people were removed from the voting rolls, since some voters may have been removed more than once if they moved from county to county multiple times.”

Initial studies indicate that 80% of purged voters who moved had moved within the county. Historically, Ohio voters who moved within the same county could cast their ballot at the county Board of Elections. In the run up to the 2008 election, 66,115 voters who moved within county were purged. Franklin County boasts 38% of the total. Fulton and Henry counties had only one each.

In 2008, the Republican Party and the Obama campaign waged a battle wherein voters were purged at the request of the Republican Party and later re-registered by the Obama campaign.

The records indicate that many voters were removed for failure to respond to a mailed notice, even though they continued to reside in the same county and some at the same voter registration address.

Verification of voter address has emerged as the key issue, not only in purge issues, but in uncounted provisional ballots. Ohio had 181,000 provisional voters, a staggeringly high number compared to only 7,000 provisional voters in Missouri and 5,000 in Virginia. These statistics come from Brunner’s first Election Summit in December 2008. In Ohio, 10% of all people voting on Election Day were forced to vote provisionally.

At the March Election Conference, Franklin County Board of Elections Deputy Director Matt Damschroder, a Republican, advocated using state and federal records to establish new addresses for Ohio voters.

Senior Counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice Lawrence Norden noted another problem with voters’ addresses. He pointed out that 36% of Ohio’s uncounted provisional ballots were the result of voters being in the wrong precinct, but often at the right polling place.

Tom McCabe, Director of the Mahoning County Board of Elections, reported that 81% of provisional votes were counted in Mahoning County. He pointed out that the number would have been 90% had the pre-Ken Blackwell rules been in effect in Ohio. Prior to Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s supervision of Ohio’s 2004 presidential election, Ohio voters in the wrong precinct still had their votes counted from the county level to the presidential level.

McCabe also decried the fact that there is no consistent statewide standard for counting provisional ballots in Ohio. In his county, a voter who was able to produce a library card with a current address was allowed to vote, although that type of ID is not officially accepted in Ohio guidelines.

In a promising development, a handful of Ohio counties noted that they did not purge voter records from their computer systems, but merely moved questionable voter names into an “inactive” status. Some “flagged” certain voters if there were concerns about their eligibility. On another positive note, Coshocton County notified the Free Press that it is a “no purge” county.

Prior to the 2004 election, most purges were concentrated in the Democratic havens of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. Public records show that in Cleveland, 24.93% of all voters were dumped from the voting rolls.

The pattern continued prior to the 2008 election, with an additional 211,000 Franklin County voters removed. Most were concentrated in the Democratically-controlled capital city of Columbus.

Just prior to the 2008 presidential election, the Free Press called attention to the Ohio Republican Party’s attempt to purge 600,000 long-time registered voters, and 200,000 newly-registered voters. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s intervention prevented the 800,000 purges by directing that Ohio voters had both the right to notification and hearing before being stripped of their voting rights. If the GOP had succeeded in eliminating the 800,000 overwhelmingly Democratic voters, John McCain may have carried Ohio by 50,000 votes, instead of losing by more than 200,000 votes.

A Jim Crow system of county-by-county partisan purges remains in effect in Ohio. The Buckeye State does not recognize voting as a fundamental human right. Voting is considered a universal and unalienable right in most other democracies. In Ohio, there’s no statewide system mandating all voters be treated equally before they lose their most basic and sacred right. In Ohio, often called the most Southern of Northern states, there is also no system in place that even requires giving a reason for disenfranchising a voter. No wonder the number of purged voters tripled last year.

–
Bob Fitrakis has a Ph.D. in political science and was an election observer in the Ohio 2004 general election, Ohio’s 2008 primary and 2008 general elections. He was the director of the Free Press Election Protection Project. This article was originally published by http://freepress.org.

6:30pm – midnight

Join progressives for a night of food, drink, music and art.
Socialize or network for your causes.
Women’s Beauty Deception display.

1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in rear

Co-sponsored by the
Central Ohio Green Education Fund Board

9:30am-5pm

Please RSVP
Doug Todd, 614-308-5681, dougsftc@yahoo.com
www.cgcongress.org

Proposed Agenda

Morning Session

9:30am Presentation of Resolutions – revisit, revise and add new resolutions
10:30 am – Prioritize resolutions

Lunch – pizza and bring your own side dish

Afternoon Session

Discussion of implementation of resolutions and activities
Possibilities include:

• City Council Watch, or Franklin County Commission Watch group—to monitor, rate, and report on their activities
• Parallel City Council or other governing organization
• Ballot initiative to enlarge City Council with district representation

Room 100 of the Northwood Building – 2231 North High Street in Columbus
two blocks north of Lane Ave.

Hope to see you there!
The Central Ohio Green Education Fund Board

McCleary spearheaded a Free Press outreach toward African American writers like Jeff Winbush and Jerolyn Barbee. McCleary got the Free Press involved in a long-running investigative series to “out” white supremacists in Ohio. The Free Press began to print the names and addresses of known Klan and neo-Nazi members, and also began to publish “Wanted” posters with their photos and vitals attached. All of this culminated with buses of anti-racist activists demonstrating outside the homes of the white supremacists. McCleary used his extensive ties with black private investigators and police officers to gather intelligence. Five white supremacists left the state rather be “outed.”

In 1995, McCleary brought together a slate of reformers to run for Columbus School Board. I had the pleasure of being one of them. While we didn’t win, much of our agenda advocating multicultural diversity and more transparency by the School Board succeeded. Just last year, I participated with Cornell in a project to screen local political candidates for office and publish our ratings and the interviews on the internet.

Cornell and I occasionally disagreed over the issue of police brutality and the approach of the Columbus Police officers in dealing with black youth. His position was far more sympathetic to the police than mine, probably due to his military background and his business Pro-Private Police Training Academy that trained private security guards. Still, Cornell and I remained friends. I remember our last joint appearance on the WOSU TV show “On the Record” where we engaged in a heated debate, then went outside and laughed about it.

Cornell embodied the style of the “new jack activism” – one that was both highly intellectual and simultaneously street-wise. His commitment to the inner-city and to equality for all people: blacks, Hispanics, gays, and whites – set him apart from most of the more traditional leaders in the community. His voice, his vision, and his laugh will be greatly missed.

Why should you attend?

Our public officials guide central Ohio’s policies & progress, but who are they?
• A Democratic Columbus City Council who never disagrees on any topic? How many are beholden to the developers — consequently moving Columbus in the sprawl direction?
• A Franklin County Commission, who oversees the Board of Elections, and allowed the long lines during the 2004 election?
• And, when was the last time you remember being excited about something our state legislature made happen?

At the Citizen’s Grassroots Congress, we will discuss:
• Resolutions from local activist groups to better our lives
• City Council Watch, or Franklin County Commission Watch group—to monitor, rate, and report on their activities
• Parallel City Council or other governing organization
• Ballot initiative to enlarge City Council with district representation

We are all responsible for moving central Ohio in the direction of supporting peace, ecologically sound practices, better services, and legislation leaning toward equity and social justice.
If you want to get involved, please join us!

The 2009 Citizens Grassroots Congress
Saturday, February 28 from 9:30am-5pm
Room 100 of the Northwood Building – 2231 North High Street in Columbus
two blocks north of Lane Ave.

Please RSVP to Doug Todd, 614-308-5681, dougsftc@yahoo.com
www.cgcongress.org

Hope to see you there!
The Central Ohio Green Education Fund Board

THE 2009 CITIZENS GRASSROOTS CONGRESS

WANTS YOU!

On February 28, 2009 from 9:30 to 5:00

At Room 100 of the Northwood Building.

(2231 N. High Street in Columbus).

Bring a potluck item for snack / salad. Pizza will be provided for lunch.

To help advance an enlightened, reform agenda for Central Ohio in the areas of Social and Economic Justice, Sustainability and the Environment, Grassroots Democracy and Peace.

In October 2007 the Citizens Grassroots Congress convened an all day session and formed an agenda of enlightenment and reform for Central Ohio. Many efforts have ensued to promote and draw attention to these issues and resolutions. Some of these efforts were effective and some were not. But many lessons were learned. Do you want a voice in vital local reform following the dark years of the last administration? Do you want to share the opportunities for your most important local issues and concerns during the Obama administration? Then you do not want to miss this meeting!

The purpose of this congress is to plan and think ahead as well as prioritize issues. To develop strategies, tactics and means to effectively let our local officials know what is important to our community. From past experience we know that if we do not influence local priorities others with more self serving goals certainly will. Join us and help make a difference.

For more information contact Doug Todd at Dougsftc@yahoo.com or Joe Keehner at 614/337-9478.

The welcome news that President Obama is taking steps to shut Guantanamo and right other Bush-era human rights abuses must quickly be joined by a proclamation of freedom for Leonard Peltier.

Peltier is the nation’s best-known native activist and has become a global symbol of abject injustice and prison abuse. Imprisoned in the late 1970s for allegedly murdering two FBI agents, Peltier has never been given a fair trial. Federal authorities have quashed or destroyed thousands of pages of evidence that might have freed Peltier decades ago.

The Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee points out that “Amnesty International considers Leonard Peltier to be a political prisoner whose avenues of redress have long been exhausted….Amnesty International recognizes that a retrial is no longer a feasible option and believes that Leonard Peltier should be immediately and unconditionally released.”

The committee adds that” Documents show that although the prosecution and government pointed the finger at Peltier for shooting FBI agents at close range during the trial in 1976, for three years the prosecution withheld critical ballistic test results proving that the fatal bullets could not have come from the gun tied to Leonard Peltier. This trial also denied evidence of self defense.”

The committee further states that: “the U.S. Prosecutor, during subsequent oral arguments, stated: “we can’t prove who shot those agents.” And that the Eighth Circuit found that “There is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government’s case.”

The committee also says that “Judge Heaney, who authored the denial now supports Mr. Peltier’s release, stating that the FBI used improper tactics to gain Mr. Peltier’s conviction.”

Now 64 years old, Peltier is suffering from diabetes and a series of other serious ailments brought on by his decades in prison. He has great grandchildren he has never seen. His case is the centerpiece of the book IN THE SPIRIT OF CRAZY HORSE by Peter Matthiessen.

Reports from Betty Peltier-Solano, Leonard’s sister, now assert that Peltier was severely beaten during a recent transfer to the Canaan Federal Penitentiary. According to Peltier-Solano, he has been held in solitary confinement and limited to a single meal a day, a serious threat to his health due to his diabetes.

Over the decades Peltier has been a model prisoner, concentrating on his art and writing. His commitment to native American rights has been consistent throughout the years, though he’s been repeatedly denied media access.

Peltier is eligible for parole in the near future. His supporters fear this latest round of abuse may be designed to discredit him. The FBI recently sent a letter accusing Peltier of prompting this latest attack. Given Peltier’s age, poor health, immanent parole status and long-standing political commitments canont be viewed as a calculated absurdity. His sister writes that “currently, the FBI is actively seeking support for his continued imprisonment.”

The political involvement of the FBI is itself an issue the President must address. At very least Peltier should be freed on bail pending a new trial, with a concerted effort on the part of the new Department of Justice to unearth all suppressed evidence in this case.

Leonard Peltier has languished unjustly in prison far longer than those held in Guantanamo. It is time to set him free!

To find out more, contact the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee at http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, which appear at http://freepress.org, along with Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES. Harvey’s HISTORY OF THE U.S. is at http://harveywasserman.com. This article was originally published by http://freepress.org.

For more info:
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

The parallels between the 1933 coming of Franklin Roosevelt and the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama must include the issue of Prohibition: alcohol in 1933, and marijuana today. As FDR did back then, Obama must now help end an utterly failed, socially destructive, reactionary crusade.

Marijuana prohibition is a core cause of many of the nation’s economic problems. It now costs the U.S. tens of billions per year to track, arrest, try, defend and imprison marijuana consumers who pose little, if any, harm to society. The social toll soars even higher when we account for social violence, lost work, ruined careers and damaged families. In 2007, 775,137 people were arrested in the U.S. for mere possession of this ancient crop, according to the FBI’s uniform crime report.

Like the Prohibition on alcohol that plagued the nation from 1920 to 1933, marijuana prohibition (which essentially began in 1937) feeds organized crime and a socially useless prison-industrial complex that includes judges, lawyers, police, guards, prison contractors, and more.

A dozen states have now passed public referenda confirming medical uses for marijuana based on voluminous research dating back 5,000 years. Confirmed medicinal uses for marijuana include treatment for glaucoma, hypertension, arthritis, pain relief, nausea relief, reducing muscle spasticity from spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis, and diminishing tremors in multiple sclerosis patients. Medical reports also prove smoked marijuana provides relief from migraine headaches, depression, seizures, and insomnia, according to NORML. In recent years its use has become critical to thousands of cancer and AIDS sufferers who need to it to maintain their appetite while undergoing chemotherapy.

The U.S. ban on marijuana extends to include hemp, one of the most widely used agricultural products in human history. Unlike many other industrial crops, hemp is powerful and prolific in a natural state, requiring no pesticides, herbicides, extraordinary fertilizing or inappropriate irrigation. Its core products include paper, cloth, sails, rope, cosmetics, fuel, supplements and food. Its seeds are a potentially significant source of bio-diesel fuel, and its leaves and stems an obvious choice for cellulosic ethanol, both critically important for a conversion to a Solartopian renewable energy supply.

Hemp was grown in large quantities by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and many more of the nation’s founders, most of whom would likely be dumbfounded to hear it is illegal (based on entries in Washington’s agricultural diaries, referring to the separation of male and female plants, it’s likely he and his cohorts also raised an earlier form of “medicinal” marijuana).

Hemp growing was mandatory in some circumstances in early America, and again during World War II, when virtually the entire state of Kansas was planted in it. The current ban on industrial hemp costs the U.S. billiions of dollars in lost production and revenue from a plant that can produce superior paper, clothing, fuel and other critical materials at a fraction the financial cost and environmental damage imposed by less worthy sources.

On January 16, 1919, fundamentalist crusaders help pass the 18th Amendment, making the sale of alcohol illegal. The ensuing Prohibition was by all accounts a ludicrous failure epitomized by gang violence and lethal “amateur” product that added to the death toll. Its only real winner was organized crime and the prison-industrial complex.

In 1933, FDR helped pass the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition, which ended a costly era of gratuitous social repression and gave the American economy—and psyche—a tangible boost.

Marijuana prohibition was escalated with Richard Nixon’s 1970 declaration of the War on Drugs. There was a brief reprieve when Steve Ford, the son of President Gerald Ford appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone barefoot and claiming that the best place to smoke pot was in the White House. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter’s last year in office, 338,664 were arrested for marijuana possession.

Ronald Reagan renewed the War on Drugs and declared his “Zero Tolerance” policy, despite his daughter Patti Davis’ claim the Gipper smoked weed with a major donor. Following Reagan, President George Herbert Walker Bush recorded a low of 260,390 marijuana possession arrests, but the numbers climbed again under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both of whom are reported to have smoked it themselves (though Clinton claims not to have inhaled).

On a percentage basis, at least as many American high school students smoke pot than students in Holland, where it is legal. In the midst of the drug war, U.S. students report virtually unlimited access to a wide range of allegedly controlled substances, including pot. Because so many Americans use it, and it is so readily available, the war on marijuana can only be seen as a virtually universal assault on the basic liberties of our citizenry.

In a 2005 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services survey, more than 97 million Americans admitted to having tried marijuana at least once. President-elect Obama makes it clear in his book Dreams From My Father that he has smoked—and inhaled—marijuana (he is also apparently addicted to a far more dangerous drug, tobacco). His administration should tax marijuana rather than trying to repress it. Like alcohol and tobacco, a minimum age for legal access should be set at 21.

As a whole, the violent, repressive War on Drugs has been forty years of legal, cultural and economic catastrophe. Like FDR, Obama must end our modern-day Prohibition, and with it the health-killing crusade against this ancient, powerful medicinal herb.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, available at http://freepress.org, along with Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES. Harvey’s SOLARTOPIA! is at http://harveywasserman.com. This article was first published by http://freepress.org.

The tragic and suspicious death of Karl Rove’s election thief in chief should send a clear message to Al Franken and other key liberals: don’t be riding in any small private planes.

Death by air crash now seems to be the favored means of ridding the Rovian right of troublesome characters.

The most recent is Michael Connell, who died Friday night when his private plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. Connell was the information techology whiz kid who helped Rove steal the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, along with a few in between—possibly including the 2002 senatorial campaign in Minnesota that followed the death of Paul Wellstone.

Connell was an expert pilot whose plane crashed in clear weather. He held virtually all the secrets to how George W. Bush was illegally foisted on the American people—and the world—for eight horrifying years. By manipulating computerized results in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 Connell made history. By some accounts, he was about to tell the attorneys in the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit how he did it. He also approached expressed a willingness to appear under oath before Congress. But now he is dead.

Current cover stories include the possibility that his plane ran out of fuel. But its crash was accompanied by a very large fireball explosion that burned for more than ten minutes. A trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell, but newspaper accounts say his body was charred beyond recognition.

Connell told various sources that he was being threatened by Rove. He canceled at least two previous flights due to mechanical failure. A father of four, his decision to fly from a highly restricted airport in Maryland remains a mystery. Connell reportedly did contract work for security-industrial agencies, like the CIA. Connell also openly acknowledged that he was the first IT contractor to move his servers behind the firewall of the US House of Representatves where he oversaw the websites of the House Judiciary Committee, Intelligence Committee, Ways and Means Committee, and Administrative Committee, arguably the four most powerful committees in the House.

He now joins such critical players as Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, Ron Brown, Mickey Leland, John Tower, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and many more critical public figures who have died in small plane crashes at questionable moments.

In all cases there are non-nefarious potential explanations for their deaths. Conspiracy theories can, indeed, be frivolous.

But so can their out-of-hand dismissal by coincidence theorists. Both Wellstone and Carnahan died two weeks before critical Senatorial elections they were favored to win in a divided Senate. In 2000, Carnahan’s Missouri seat was taken by his wife, who subsequently lost it.

Wellstone, the leading liberal light in the US Senate, had been personally threatened by Dick Cheney for opposing the Iraq war. Wellstone’s plane crashed under dubious circumstances, carrying himself, his wife and daughter. In an extremely questionable outcome, Norm Coleman got his seat.

Coleman was hand-picked by Karl Rove to run against Wellstone. His ensuing victory over stand-in candidate Walter Mondale was the highly unlikely outcome of a messy, manipulated election that coincided with equally dubious senatorial vote counts in Georgia and Colorado.

Al Franken may now be poised to take back the Wellstone seat for the Democratic Party. As an Air America talk host, he repeatedly mocked those who were investigating the theft of the 2004 election.

But he now owes the possibility of being elected to the diligent work of election protection activists who have fought all these years for fair, open and reliable vote counts. Had former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell been in charge of this year’s Minnesota election, Franken would not even be in the running.

Ironically, a brutal right-wing hate campaign is now being waged against Franken, charging him with election theft. Among other things, it claims he “went to Hollywood” for money to steal his way into the Senate.

Were it not for the deaths of so many others before him, such talk could be dismissed out of hand.

But under the circumstances, we would strongly urge Al Franken not to be flying in any small planes.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION…, and AS GOES OHIO, available at www.freepress.org, where this article was first published. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln civil rights lawsuit pursuing Michael Connell. This article originally appeared at http://freepress.org.

Michael Connell, the crucial techno- lynch pin in the theft of the 2004 election, and much more, is dead at the age of 45. His unnatural, suspicious death raises serious questions about the corruption of the American electoral process that now may never be answered.

Connell died Friday, December 19 when his Piper Saratoga plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. He was flying himself home from the College Park, Maryland airport. An accomplished pilot, flying in unremarkable weather, his death cuts off a critical path to much of what may never be known about how the 2004 election was shifted from John Kerry to George W. Bush in the wee hours of November 2. His plane crashed between two houses in an upscale neighborhood, one vacant, just 2.5 miles from the Akron-Canton airport.

A long-time, outspokenly loyal associate of the Bush family, Connell created the Bush-Cheney website for their 2000 presidential campaign. Connell may have played a role in various computer malfunctions that helped the GOP claim the presidency in 2000. As a chief IT consultant and operative for Karl Rove, Connell was a devout Catholic and the father of four children. In various interviews and a deposition Connell cited his belief that abortion is murder as a primary motivating factor in his work for the Republican Party.

Connell recently wrote the following in his New Media Communications newsletter, regarding Barack Obama’s election: “In our 230 year history, our democracy has suffered worse fates. It’s just that none come to mind right now.” Connell wrote: “This is just a moment in time and this too shall pass. Enduring is the fact that 2000 years ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem. When our Lord God sent his only Son for our salvation,…In spite of the current economic and political conditions, salvation is eternal.”

Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired Connell in 2004 to create a real-time computer data compilation for counting Ohio’s votes. Under Connell’s supervision, Ohio’s presidential vote count was transmitted to private, partisan computer servers owned by SmartTech housed in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell’s company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell’s clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com. The SmartTech servers at one point housed Karl Rove’s emails. Some of Rove’s email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated court-sanctioned attempts to review them.

In 2001, Michael Connell’s GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network, the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR [House Information Resources] to place its server behind the firewall, he bragged.

At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio’s presidential campaign. The Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.

But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion—in Bush’s favor—between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.

Until his death Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees. But on the day before the 2008 election, Connell was deposed by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count, and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove’s e-mail files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.

Various threats have been repeatedly reported involving Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, stating: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King-Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio,….”

Connell’s death comes at a moment where election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. In his pre-election deposition, Connell was generally evasive, but did disclose key pieces of information that could prove damaging to Karl Rove and the GOP. Examining attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit, stemming from the 2004 election theft, were confident Connell had far more to tell.

There is widespread concern that this may be the reason he is now dead.

Revised December 21, 2008

———-
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including AS GOES OHIO and HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICAS 2004 ELECTION…, available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King- Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit which subpoenaed and was deposing Michael Connell.

by Bob Fitrakis

We all know that the Wolfe Family Newsletter, aka The Columbus Dispatch, has other relatives in the industry. There’s the staid uncle who secretly reads Hustler, who publishes The Ohio Magazine, the bastard stepchildren who put out This Week, and the flashy niece who flaunts herself over at Today’s Columbus Woman.

So, when you see Farah Majidzadeh’s splashy cover photo on July’s Today’s Columbus Woman, you can bet that she’s a Wolfe Family fave and politically connected. Her air-brushed, spin-doctored puff piece sent more than one investigative reporter running to their “deep throat” sources and their “top-secret” data banks. The Wolfe spin portrays Ms. Majidzadeh as one of Columbus’ leading female entrepreneurs, the head of Resource International, Inc., a Columbus-based engineering and construction-testing firm. Lest we suspect that Farah could be a female Tommy Banks-you know, one of those ersatz affirmative action front owners-Today’s Columbus Woman points out that Farah owns 67 percent of the business, while her husband Kamran owns the remaining 33 percent.

What the article doesn’t mention is that Resource International is a leading pay-to-play firm in Ohio politics. Between 1990 and 1994, the Majidzadeh family and in-laws gave at least $8,250 to Governor George V. Voinovich’s campaign coffers. Like Banks, the Majidzadeh bunch have gotten more than their share of state contracts, and not just in the construction field.

Recall that the Dispatch’s best investigative reporter, Bob Ruth, was hot on the trail of Farah’s daughter, Marcia, two years ago, when the Big D powers that be muzzled him. Marcia Majidzadeh and her husband owned Nationwide Equipment Enterprises. Ring a bell? The company that allegedly bilked a program to aid the blind out of some $253,900. In March 1993, Nationwide Equipment received a six-month contract from the Ohio Rehabilitation Services Commission to operate vending machines at rest stops. Thirty-seven-and-a-half percent of the gross receipts were to go to the state of Ohio to be used to help blind people establish their own food and beverage businesses at state rest stops. Ruth broke the story on July 24, 1994 that state records showed that Nationwide Equipment owed $120,395 in underreported receipts, had bounced $104,588 worth of checks, and had failed to pay the state $28,917 for cleaning bills at the 13 rest stops. On July 30, Ruth reported that the company had failed to “post a performance bond” even though their state contract called for it. And at the same time the state canceled her contract, in her zeal to serve the disabled, Marcia changed the name of her company to Consult-Systems, Inc. and signed a false name on another state Rehabilitation Services Commission contract bid application. Now she was the more waspy-sounding “Marsha May.”

But, Marcia had a pretty good explanation. You see, “people often had trouble pronouncing and spelling her real name,” particularly when they’ve been reading it in the paper in relationship to someone allegedly stealing from the blind. Marsha, Marsha, Marsha! Things got so bad that the Department of Aging canceled a contract that she and her husband were scheduled to sign to cater meals to senior citizens at the Ohio State Fair. Let’s see, the blind…the elderly…no doubt handicapped children breathed a sigh of relief after that.

Here’s the story of a lovely lady, who was building up a business of her own. And then one day when that lady met the governor, she knew that it was much more than a hunch. That if she gave him a lot of money, he could probably help her business out a bunch. Damage control time. Farah and Kamran pulled a George Voinovich and wept openly about their bum son-in-law, Ali Sharifrazi (aka Ali S. Razi), who deceived their daughter and allegedly forged her name. Actual quote: “Majidzadeh’s parents fought back tears as they described their surprise…” They were “shocked,” shocked, I say! The distraught parents failed to explain how their poor, duped, 30-year-old daughter who had nothing to do with any wrongdoing, not only submitted a bid in the name of Marsha May, but showed up for a “coin-toss ceremony” at the Ohio Division of Purchasing. The coin toss broke a tie between “Marsha May” and another bidder over the state contract.

Poor Marcia; she emerged a double loser. Not only did she lose the toss, but state officials realized that Marsha May was a fraud. Now, we know who Marsha May really is and we know her game. The question remains, who is Farah Majidzadeh and what is her financial relationship, if any, with the disgraced former Chief of Staff Paul Mifsud? Let’s toss a coin: heads-it’s contract steering, tails-it’s just another one of those funny Voinovich coincidences.

All evidence suggests that since the onset of the George Voinovich administration in January 1991, the governor’s recently resigned chief of staff, Paul Mifsud, systematically engineered the steering of contracts and public funds to political backers and Voinovich family members.

The firing of Joseph Gilyard on July 22, 1991 by the Voinovich administration was a clear harbinger of the governor’s current problems. Gilyard, who had been director of the Office of Criminal Justice Services and a long-time loyal supporter of the state’s Republican machine, was canned shortly after he alleged that he was under political pressure to give the governor’s brother’s company valuable state prison construction contracts.

The firing paved the way for Mifsud, formerly vice president of the Voinovich Cos., to operate with virtually no restraints within the governor’s administration. As chief of staff, Mifsud was put in charge of the Ohio Department of Transportation, the Commerce Department and the Development Department, and used that position of power to serve the interests of political backers and personal favorites.

Recent allegations that contracts were steered towards the Banks-Carbone Construction Company may be just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an open secret in the local construction and architecture industry that over the last five years most major design and construction management contracts have been awarded in a blatantly partisan manner. Many contractors believe that the state’s Department of Administrative Services has repeatedly gone through a charade of soliciting proposals and later interviewing qualified architectural construction management companies for state projects prior to steering the contracts to what appeared to be predetermined winners. According to construction industry insiders, projects that seem to fit this pattern include:

· Five prison contracts totaling $150 million awarded to Knowlton Construction Company to build or renovate five state prisons, despite the company having little or no previous experience as a prison construction manager.
· The $80 million Max Fisher Business School, the $85 million Schottenstein Arena at Ohio State, and the $110 million Hilltop Office Complex to the Gilbane Building Company. In all three cases, the Banks-Carbone Construction Company was selected as the minority partner.
· The $65 million new COSI building to the Ruscilli Construction Company.
· The $20 million reconstruction of the riot-damaged Lucasville prison to the Sherman R. Smoot Company.
· Various contracts to the Voinovich Cos. and Voinovich-Sgro to build and renovate jails, including the Franklin County jail.

Following George Voinovich’s electoral victory in November 1990, Lieutenant Governor Michael DeWine appointed Gilyard director of the Governor’s Office of Criminal Justice Services in January 1991. Gilyard’s previous experience included being executive assistant to George Forbes, Cleveland City Council president; chief of staff for Cuyahoga County Commissioner Virgil Brown; court administrator for Chief Justice Thomas Moyer; and director of the Ohio Court of Claims. As director of the Office of Criminal Justice Services, Gilyard’s tasks were to coordinate planning and funding for all of Ohio’s criminal justice agencies and dispense state funds for area jail construction projects. Over the eight-year period from 1983 to 1991, the Office of Criminal Justice Services awarded some $200 million in jail construction monies.

Within six months of his hiring, Gilyard was disgraced and hounded by several charges-theft in office, lying to the Voinovich administration about his past, and allegations of sexual harassment-that were later all summarily dismissed. Gilyard’s termination and public humiliation served as a head on a spike to all who dared cross Mifsud.

Gilyard’s tenure turned tenuous immediately after an early “get acquainted” meeting with lobbyist Phil Hamilton, head of the Voinovich transition team and former executive vice president of Voinovich Cos.; and Bennett J. Cooper, Gilyard’s predecessor in the administration of Governor James A. Rhodes.

“[Hamilton] had been bugging me and bugging me to come over,” Gilyard said in an interview with Columbus Alive. When he walked up to the office at 8 E. Long Street, Gilyard said he noticed a plaque over the door. “In gold leaf it says ‘Hamilton and Associates, The Voinovich Cos.’ I about passed out.”

In fact, Candace Peters, a criminal justice administrator, had warned Hamilton during the 1990 campaign that the Voinovich Cos. was facing a potential conflict-of-interest situation over the building of local jails in Ohio.

Despite the warning, the pressure from Hamilton and his associates was “never-ending,” Gilyard insists. For example, he says, at “a reception for all the Voinovich criminal justice people, Hamilton is bothering me again. Cooper’s coming over [to his office] every other two, three days. He’s calling me. He’s going on trips with me,” Gilyard recalls.

Both Cooper and Hamilton are on record denying having pressured Gilyard to receive jail construction grants and contracts.

In a memo to DeWine dated February 1, 1991, Gilyard outlined his problems with the initial meeting with Cooper, Hamilton, and his wife, Patricia Hamilton. According to Gilyard, the talk immediately turned to jail construction contracts and Gilyard said he felt he had to excuse himself. Gilyard said he believed the meeting “raised a significant question as to its propriety” since there was a 1987 Attorney General’s opinion that jail construction grants were state contracts and candidate George Voinovich had pledged that his brother Paul’s company would receive no state contracts.

Patricia Hamilton was soon thereafter appointed the chairperson of State Board of Personnel Review, the board that would later approve Gilyard’s ouster as director.

While others mulled the memo, Gilyard’s attention was drawn to Sheriff Earl Smith. In late March, early April, Gilyard began investigating allegations of impropriety surrounding Sheriff Smith’s Franklin County Drug Enforcement Network (DEN). Gilyard’s now-famous April 12, 1991 memo to DeWine basically summarized various allegations of illegal activity by DEN agents. DeWine froze the funding for the program and, Gilyard later claimed, ordered him to “destroy the memo.” The DEN missive-together with the February 1 memo-unwittingly set the stage for Gilyard’s later dismissal.

At about this time, Sharon Downs, an assistant deputy director of Administrative Services-and wife of John Downs, then-personnel director for Earl Smith and a protege of Voinovich transition director Hamilton-accessed a computer file on Gilyard’s personnel history. Prior to accepting his position, Gilyard had interviewed with Secretary of State Bob Taft’s office where he talked openly about a 1975 incident at Indian River School, a juvenile detention facility where he was fired from the staff and convicted for hitting a youth. The misdemeanor conviction was later overturned. Despite the fact that Gilyard made no secret of the incident, DeWine claimed that Gilyard had failed to disclose the incident during his background check and subsequently he fired Gilyard in July of 1991, even though he later conceded that he was aware of the 1975 incident when Gilyard was hired.

As Gilyard recalls, he was originally offered the job to protect DeWine because, like Mifsud, he was raised in the hardball political scene in Cleveland. Gilyard said he was told: “You were in Cleveland politics, and Mike’s afraid that those guys are going to eat him alive.” Gilyard claims that early on, Mifsud surrounded himself with ambitious “young Republicans….We used to call them ‘brown shirts’ like in Germany.” Politically, you couldn’t make any mistakes in dealing with Mifsud, according to Gilyard: “Mifsud would cut your throat off.”

In June, Smith, angered at Gilyard for freezing his drug task force funds, met with Mifsud about instituting a thaw. Smith gave Mifsud an investigation file on Gilyard. In a two-pronged strategy, Hamilton-who was on Smith’s payroll as a $1,000 a month management contractor-met with DeWine and offered to mediate the dispute between Smith and DeWine over task force funding.

In the meantime, pressure from Hamilton and Cooper mounted, Gilyard claims, adding that he felt compelled to approach Mifsud about the Voinovich Cos.’ apparent conflict of interest. He said he went early to a Cabinet meeting. “I said ‘Paul, you have to do something about this jail stuff….I’m telling him this story and literally…he put his hands over his ears like a little kid. ‘I don’t want to know, get away from me, stay away from me,’ and he ran around the Cabinet table to the other side and turned his back on me.”

Around the first of July, Paul Voinovich sent his brother 14 pages of material-including copies of Gilyard’s personnel history-with handwritten comments to the effect that there were problems with Gilyard. It was virtually the same package Smith had given Mifsud in June.

Gilyard had confronted Sheriff Smith about the allegations against the DEN agents. While Smith denied them and insisted that he get his funding back, both he and Gilyard have confirmed that, during the conversation, Smith made Gilyard aware of illegal campaign contributions that the trash haulers had made to the 1990 Voinovich campaign.

Gilyard claims Smith “sent a direct threat to the governor” to back off his drug task force, and immediately Smith began to crack down on overloaded garbage trucks in Franklin County. “Now, what actually happened was, when Earl had told me about the illegal campaign contributions, he actually was making trash trucks dump their trash in the city streets of Columbus. There’s pictures in the Dispatch. Nobody could understand why. I, of course, knew why, and I’m telling the governor and I’m telling these people why and Mifsud’s pooh-poohing me, although he knew better,” Gilyard explained.

In what even he describes as an end run to get to the governor the information about the activities of his brother Paul, Hamilton and Mifsud, Gilyard said he arranged a meeting with David B. Bailey, a Cleveland Republican Ward Committeeman and Voinovich confidante for over 30 years; and former Cuyahoga County Republican Party Chair, Robert Hughes.

Hughes, one of the state’s most powerful Republicans, had recently formed his own political consulting company. “We met with Hughes in Hughes’ basement. It was Hughes, Hughes’ wife, Bailey, my wife and myself. Bob took prodigious notes. Five pages of notes on a yellow pad. He agreed to see the governor, and I believe he made a phone call to Columbus that night,” recalled Gilyard.

Whether or not the governor got the information is unknown. Hughes died in November of 1991 under mysterious circumstances, the victim of carbon monoxide poisoning.

On July 15, 1991, Gilyard sent another troubling memo to DeWine questioning the propriety of the Voinovich Cos.’ lobbying efforts. Within a week, he was suspended and then fired by DeWine, who accused him of withholding information about the 1975 Indian River incident. DeWine also claimed that he hadn’t received any memo from Gilyard regarding the Voinovich Cos.’ intense lobbying efforts. Earl Smith had in the meantime filed theft-in-office charges against Gilyard.

On August 7, Curt Steiner, chief spokesman for Voinovich, stated that DeWine was aware of the 1975 Indian River incident when he first interviewed Gilyard in December. Late in August, a nearly 1,000-page Ohio Highway Patrol report substantially supported Gilyard’s claim that he had sought to repeatedly warn Mifsud of ethical problems.

A little more than a week after Gilyard’s departure, the Columbus Dispatch reported that, “Two well-connected Statehouse lobbyists- one with ties with Governor George V. Voinovich’s brother and another appointed by Voinovich to a state commission-helped clients land unbid contracts as part of a $350 million state bond issue.” Hamilton was the lobbyist for Goldman Sachs & Co., which, along with Lehman Brothers, received the unbid contracts to handle about $175 million in bond issues on behalf of the Ohio Housing Finance Agency.

On October 3, Franklin County Judge Richard Ferrell dismissed Smith’s charges against Gilyard, citing “no probably cause.” On October 18, after months denying its existence, DeWine turned over a copy of Gilyard’s July 15 memo, claiming that he had recently discovered it in a desk at his second home. DeWine dismissed Gilyard’s thoughtful memo as “a goofy, long narrative.” The memo remains a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the current contract-steering allegations against Mifsud.

After Hughes’ death in November 1991, the Ohio Ethics Commission-with new Voinovich appointees-ruled that it wasn’t a conflict of interest for the governor’s brother to take state jail construction funds.

One monument to the political machine that steamrolled over Gilyard stands in Franklin County: the renovated Franklin County jail, built in 1970 by Pringle and Pratt. According to former Sheriff Smith, now running again for his old job, the Voinovich Cos. originally did the architectural assessment for the renovation at the Franklin County jail. They were paid $75,000, and received another $18,000 for their estimate that the jail could be renovated for $2 million. The $2 million renovation has turned into an $11 million-plus project.

Smith said that the Voinovich Cos. recently renovated a kitchen at the jail that had already been renovated “down to leveling the floors” in 1990.

“There was no bid from the Voinovich Cos. They said that since the Voinovich Cos. had done the original architectural assessment, that constituted a bid,” Smith said.

The Ohio Republican Party has escalated its attacks on democracy on two key fronts.

It’s trying to steal a hotly contested Congressional seat. And it’s moving to restrict voting rights for coming elections.

In the bitterly embattled House race in central Ohio’s 15th Congressional District, Republican State Senator Steve Stivers has a slight lead over Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy.

Two years ago, Kilroy essentially defeated the previous incumbent, fourth-ranked House Republican Deborah Pryce. In an extremely tight race, a wide range of dubious voter eliminations and manipulated vote counts stole what appears to have been a clear victory from Kilroy. The GOP’s infamous J. Kenneth Blackwell was still Ohio’s Secretary of State. The Democrats declined to take him on, and the seat remained in Republican hands.

This year Ohio’s Secretary of State is Democrat Jennifer Brunner. It would appear Kilroy has won again.

But the Republicans are on their usual anti-voter attack. With the help of Matt Damshroeder, Deputy Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, the GOP has used a range of insider information to challenge about a thousand provisional ballots cast in heavily Democratic areas of the district. In particular they argue that a minor voter omission on the ballots should disqualify them. If they win that case, Stivers might well take the seat.

Brunner has gone to federal court asking that all the votes be counted. A decision from Judge Algernon Marbley is expected on Thursday.

Damshroeder’s role reflects a classic Democratic indifference to election protection. Damshroeder is a past chair of the Franklin County GOP. He also served as the county chair for the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign.

Prior to that election, while acting as Director of the Franklin County BOE, Damshroeder accepted a $10,000 check from a Diebold representative in his office at the BOE. The board was deciding at the time whether or not to buy Diebold machines.

Damshroeder asked that the check be made out to the Franklin County Republican Party. When the incident surfaced in the media, he apologized for the “impropriety.” But the GOP kept the check. And Damshroeder was “punished” with one month’s paid leave, even though Democrats could have had him removed.

Damshroeder is now Deputy BOE Director. His insider enabling role in the attempt to disenfranchise a thousand voters in his own district is problematic at best. The Ohio Democratic Party has finally issued a few angry e-blasts about it. But Brunner has the power to actually remove Damshroder. Doing so would send a message the Dems are finally serious about election protection.

The Republicans are also trying to make it harder for the general public to vote in the next election. In the lame duck session after the theft of the 2004 election, the GOP-controlled Legislature passed an extremely restrictive bill aimed at disenfranchising thousands of Ohioans and making recounts of federal balloting virtually impossible.

But the GOP inadvertently included a provision that allowed new voters to register and cast a ballot on the same day. In 2008 the GOP sued Brunner to try to close that window. But Brunner prevailed in court, and tens of thousands of first-time voters came out to the polls in late September and the first week of October. By some news accounts these early voters backed Obama by margins as high as 12:1.

The embarrassed and angry Republicans have now vowed to rid the process of this pro-voter opening in the upcoming lame duck session of the Legislature. But if they do, it’s likely the new governor, Democrat Ted Strickand, will veto the bill and sit on it. Next year the Democrats will control the Ohio House, and are unlikely to allow such a bill to go through.

By then, perhaps Matt Damshroeder will be out of a job, and Mary Jo Kilroy will be in Congress. But one thing is certain: the GOP attack on the right to vote is unlikely to have abated.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION … and AS GOES OHIO, available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Their radio shows are broadcast at WVKO-AM 1580, Air America in Columbus, Ohio.

As the sun sets on Bush 2, it is clear that a very thin line of electoral protection preserved Barack Obama’s victory in Ohio—and the nation.

And it’s no accident the vote count battle for a Columbus-area Congressional seat still rages.

The GOP’s 2008 electoral strategy again emphasized massive voter disenfranchisement and rigging the electronic vote count. The twin tactics very nearly gave Ohio to McCain/Palin, and threatened to set precedents capable of winning them the national election.

Prior to the 2004 vote, Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell stripped some 308,000 Ohio citizens from the registration rolls in heavily Democratic districts. This mass disenfranchisement alone may have accounted for the 118,000-plus official margin that gave George W. Bush a second term in the White House.

After the 2004 vote, Blackwell disenfranchised another 170,000 voters in heavily Democratic Franklin County (Columbus).

But in 2006, Democrat Jennifer Brunner was elected to replace Blackwell. Ironically, the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit filed against Blackwell over 2004 election irregularities has carried over, making Brunner the defendant (we are plaintiff and defendant in that suit). As a result, negotiations between Brunner and election protection attorneys have been on-going since she took office.

In the lead-up to the 2008 elections, the GOP tried yet another massive voter purge. Through the “caging” technique of sending unsolicited “do not forward” junk mail, GOP operatives obtained by returned mail the names of some 600,000 registered Ohio voters. Some were serving in Iraq. Also, the GOP once again fought to purge voters for “inactivity” as they sought to eliminate voters who hadn’t voted in four-years as opposed to eight, even if they voted in state and local eletions..

The GOP demanded the right to disenfranchise these voters. But Brunner directed that each was entitled to notice and an individual in-person hearing.

As Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have reported, the GOP used similar caging throughout the US, aimed at millions of likely Democratic voters.

The GOP also went after 200,000 new Ohio voters whose registrations showed minor discrepancies. Included were variations in social security and drivers’ license numbers, or changes in middle names, nicknames and addresses.

But Brunner fought to protect these names from GOP challenge, and was upheld by the US Supreme Court, who refused to hear the GOP case prior to the election.

Based on projected demographic and voter turnout statistics, the elimination of these four-fifths of a million voters (some 5.4 million votes were counted in Ohio 2008) could have shifted a 200,000-vote victory for Obama to a 40,000-vote triumph for McCain. This projection is based on a conservative estimate that 80% of these targeted voters vote Democratic and 50% would have turned out to vote.

Partly in response to pressure from election protection activists, Brunner also facilitated early and absentee voting. Polling stations opened by September 30 throughout the state. Despite GOP efforts, a full week was available to those who wished to register and vote at the same time. As least 25% of Ohio’s voters cast their ballots prior to Election Day. By most accounts these votes went overwhelmingly for Obama. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Democrats outvoted Republicans 12-1 in early voting.

Brunner also tried to make paper ballots available to all voters who wanted them. Under often dubious financial arrangements with a direct conflict of interest as a stockholder, Blackwell installed Diebold electronic voting machines designed to account for as many as half Ohio’s 2008 votes.

But the GOP-controlled legislature manipulated the finances behind the push for paper ballots. Ohio’s 88 counties eventually provided enough of them for at least 25% of the voters. But so many voted early that reports now indicate there were ultimately enough paper ballots at the Election Day polling stations for nearly all who wanted them.

Other GOP attempts at disenfranchisement also fell flat. When the Republican sheriff of Greene County attempted to prosecute 304 students (many of them African-American) for “voter fraud” he ignited a massive public outcry. At issue was the common confusion over whether a student will vote at home or at college. Under widespread attack, the sheriff backed off. But students at public universities and liberal arts colleges throughout the rest of the state reported GOP harassment.

Despite widespread attempts to avoid them, there were 186,000 provisional ballots cast in Ohio 2008, some 40,000 more than the 141,000 cast in 2004 (16,000 of which have never been counted). Independent observers reported on-going confusion about the use of provisional ballots, largely attributed to poor pollworker training.

A federal database used to check driver’s license information went down for nearly three hours on Election Day due to what the Ohio Department of Public Safety said was “a large fiber-optic cable being cut in Texas.”

Despite an increase of 319,000 registered Ohio voters in 2008 over 2004, the official turnout was actually lower. Barack Obama received 22,000 fewer votes than John Kerry. John McCain got 317,000 fewer than Bush. Election protection experts attribute this to a selective GOP padding of the 2004 vote count, especially in three heavily Republican southwestern counties where irregularities and improbabilities abounded.

An observer in Miami County reported that a Republican election director illegally forced recently-moved citizens to vote provisionally. In Franklin County, pollbooks wrongly identified 35,000 voters as provisional. Four black voters in Fairfield County reported being purged despite stable long-term residencies. The Republican-connected company Triad, infamous for its secretive work on central tabulators in 2004, emerged in the majority of Ohio counties as the keeper of electronic pollbooks for the boards of elections.

While these and other irregularities bruised the election, there were far fewer than reported in 2004. The presence of hundreds of well-trained and equipped election protection volunteers throughout the state seem to have staved off any GOP attempt to repeat the massive disenfranchisement that gave the 2004 Ohio vote count to George W. Bush. Key Ohio polling stations were graced with independent election observers appointed by the Green Party. Independent video-the-vote teams, nonpartisan election observers, and Obama supporters were placed outside the polls documenting all that happened. With an apparently workable distribution of voting machines and sufficient paper ballots as a backup (along with a clear sunny day) the horrors of long lines in Ohio’s 2004 election were avoided in 2008.

The Ohio vote count also seems to have been successfully protected. In Licking County, a voter reported that his paper ballot was put in a bag without an envelope. In Youngstown, Joyce Stewart reports being given a paper ballot that had no place to choose a president.

E-voting machines in three Columbus precincts double-counted votes. In heavily Democratic Lucas County, four out of eight e-voting machines in precinct 20, recorded no votes for president, while recording far higher vote counts for such minor offices as county coroner.

The poll judge in Columbus precinct 25G tried to have legitimate exit pollers arrested. In Trumbull County, Warner Lange observed that “all of the votes cast using a paper ballot between the hours of 6:30am and 8:15 am are invalid because none of the voters were asked, as required, to sign the pollbook.”

In Hamilton and Franklin Counties (Cincinnati and Columbus) early and absentee ballots were not counted on Election Night, as originally planned. It took three hours after the polls closed for Union County election officials to get their ballots scanned. Terry Grimm reported that “everything was wrong” coming from the Summit County town of Barberton, causing a delayed tabulation.

Kevin Egler in Portage County reported that after 2800 votes were scanned on election night, a “corrupted card signal” came out, forcing election officials to start the vote count over.

Ultimately, despite Brunner’s attempts to get rid of them, hundreds of thousands of votes were again cast and counted on electronic voting machines with no paper trail and no way to do a reliable recount.

But missing this time was an electronic theft apparatus under the control of Blackwell and Karl Rove.

On Election Night 2004, Blackwell e-mailed Ohio’s electronic vote count to a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that also housed the servers for the Republican National Committee. The tally “miraculously” shifted from Kerry to Bush between 12:30 and 2 am, ultimately giving Bush a second term.

The data was handled under a state contract funneled by Blackwell to Michael Connell, a shadowy Bush family IT specialist who programmed the official Bush-Cheney website in 2000 and 2004.

On the day before the 2008 election, Connell was forced to testify under oath under cross-examination by King-Lincoln-Bronzeville attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis. Among the questions at issue was whether Connell left any “Trojan Horse” programs in place in the Ohio electronic vote count structure through which he could have hacked the 2008 outcome.

There has yet to be a definitive answer to that question, or to what he actually may have done to the 2004 vote count. But, for what it’s worth, Karl Rove did shift his predictions from a McCain victory to one for Obama shortly after the federal court agreed to force Connell to testify.

There may be much to celebrate in the apparent legitimacy of the Ohio 2008 vote count.

But half the state’s ballots are still slated to be cast on electronic voting machines whose source codes remain under private lock and key. There is no guarantee Ohio voters will have universal access to paper ballots in future elections. In direct violation of federal law, no fewer than 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties destroyed all or most of their federal election records after the 2004 election, making a definitive recount impossible. There have been no state or federal prosecutions.

The “minor” irregularities and attempted voter disenfranchisements observed in Ohio 2008 were repeated throughout the US, and could easily resurface in future elections if they are not again thoroughly observed.

And in Columbus, the Republicans are right now suing Brunner to throw out thousands of provisional ballots cast in a Congressional race still in hot dispute. Incredibly, the GOP is operating on inside information fed it by Franklin County assistant BOE director Matt Damshroder.

Damshroder accepted a $10,000 check in his BOE office from a Diebold representative. The check was made out to the Republican Party. Damshroder was given a one-month paid suspension for this in 2005. With Democratic assent, he remains a key player in the vote count that will determine whether heavily Democratic Franklin County could be stopped from sending its first Democrat to Congress since 1980.

Nationwide the GOP successfully disenfranchised millions of likely voters in Election 2008. Easily hacked, un-monitorable e-voting machines are still spread throughout the United States. The opportunities to steal future elections that are certain to be far tighter than 2008 remain readily available.

Much has been learned in the Bush era of the Unelected President. There is simply no doubt that the thousands of volunteers who worked tirelessly to protect the election of 2008 in Ohio and throughout the nation in fact prevented the GOP from stealing yet another one.

But unless this administration implements automatic voter registration, universal hand counted paper ballots, the total elimination of electronic voting machines, expanded windows for voting and a far more secure system of impartial citizen observation, the specter of still more stolen elections will haunt our democracy.

Indeed, we will still have to wonder if that’s what we really have here.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s four co-authored books on election protection include HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, and AS GOES OHIO, both available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Their next and final book and movie on the topic are in the works. Their radio shows are broadcast at WVKO 1580AM, central Ohio’s Air America affiliate.

original article:
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/3289

Computerized voting, promoted by an interlocking cabal of politicaloperatives and vendors is strangling American democracy. According to Election Data Services,almost 80% of all voters in 2006 voted on electronic voting machines oroptically-scanned ballots nationwide. Less than 1% of voters in theU.S. used traditional hand-counted paper ballots.

What has caused this meteoric rise in computerized voting and votecounting where proprietary secrets destroy the transparency of theelection process? A massive public relations campaign by a handful ofstrategically placed individuals has peddled computer voting as thehigh-tech wave of the future.

Tom Wilkey, the Executive Director of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent bipartisan commission created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, is a leading advocate for electronic voting. He told the Los Angeles Timesfollowing the 2006 Congressional elections, that “When you look at asituation [2006 election] where we have 183,000 precincts in thiscountry, there have been very, very few problems proportionately.”Wilkey also administered the testing and certifying of voting machinesthrough NASED, the National Association of State Election Directors.

Another key proponent is Doug Lewis, the director of the Houston-based Election Center, whom David Broder of the Washington Post describes as, “the man who knows more about the conduct of elections than anyone else in the country.” Lewis gushed in USA Today:“It looks like it [2006 election] actually went better than everybodyexpected. My God, it’s a big country, and you’d expect some glitches.”

In reality, there were significant electronic voting problems in the2006 election all over the country. As Ellen Theisen, founder of Voters Unite!,points out “What if voting machines failed at thousands of pollingplaces in over half the states, and the problems caused such severedelays in eight states that voting hours were extended? Is that ‘just afew glitches?’”

Here in Ohio and across thenation, the electronic voting machines recorded statistically unlikelyundervotes. In a hotly contested Congressional electionin Sarasota, Florida, the machines recorded that 13%, or 18,000 of thevotes, failed to register in a race decided by 368 votes. In Montgomery County, Ohio, some 30,000 votes failed to record in the U.S. Senate race because of improper touchscreen machine “calibration.” In Franklin County, Ohio,a Domestic Relations judicial race produced more than 22,000 unexpectedundervotes. A recount and court hearing proved that it was impossibleto audit the electronic machines that “glitched.”

Ohio machines deemed vulnerable

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s much-anticipated studyfound Ohio’s election system riddled with “critical security failures.”Released in December 2007, after attempts by the Republican-dominatedlegislature to block the funding, the review showed massive problemsinvolved with electronic voting systems. The corporate vendor-connectedMicrosolved,Inc. concluded as part of the study that Ohio’s computer voting machinevendors have “failed to adopt, implement and follow industry-standardbest practices in the development of the system.” Among them, accordingto the independent academics who wrote a different section of thereport, was the “pervasive misapplication of security technology.”
They specifically cited the lack of “standard and well-known practicesfor the use of cryptology, key and password management and securityhardware.” The academics went on to describe computer voting softwarepractices as “deeply flawed.” The result leads to “fragile software inwhich exploitable crashes, lockups, and failures are common in normaluse.”

Paperless voting machines to be replaced

Earlier in 2007, Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist and the State legislature agreed to ban direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting systems. After extensive testing in California, Secretary of State (SoS) Debra Bowen,announced that DRE voting systems made by Sequoia and Diebold would bebanned from use. Bowen’s testing prompted her Colorado counterpart, Mike Coffman,to decertify many of his state’s e-voting systems. Rather than installcomputerized vote counting machines with known system failures andsecurity inadequacies, New York State has refused to “improve” its lever-based voting machinery by going electronic and as a result faces a federal lawsuit.

Bo Lipari, executive director of New Yorkers for Verified Votingasserts, “State after state which adopted electronic touch screen DREsare now abandoning them for paper ballots and ballot scanners. DREscannot and do not protect our right to vote.”

It is becoming clear that the “Help America Vote Act of 2002″ (HAVA),the broadest voting reform effort of the past generation, created inthe response to the “hanging chads” of the 2000 election, is a $4billion boondoggle. The legislation, is called the “Hack America VoteAct” by election integrity activists, or the “Help America’s VendorsAct.” And vendor-abetting is what Lewis’ Election Center is all about.
Who are Wilkey & Lewis?

A look at the top two entries on the Kudzu Chart(pp. 20-21 of this issue) documents that Wilkey and Lewis have beeninstrumental in the extremely successful, well-coordinated plan to handU.S. elections, the voters, and the future of this nation over to whatcan only be described as a voting industrial complex: a privatized,for-profit system controlled by the voting machine equipment vendors inalliance with their key allies – neo-con ideologues and the military-and security-industrial elite.

An investigation headed by Sheri Myers and the Free Pressof Wilkey and Lewis, documents that they have used the cover of the“nonprofit, nonpartisan” Election Center to: create a nexus forelection officials and the vendors to conspire to push electronicvoting, take over the testing and certifying of the voting machines onbehalf of the vendors, and assume control of U.S. elections through theElection Assistance Commission.
Another look at the Kudzu Chart, comparing the involvement in columns 2and 22, reveals that a core group of electronic voting advocates cameout of the Election Center and now essentially run the EAC. (For biosof the players, go to: www/freepress.org) The EAC was charged by HAVAto distribute billions of dollars around the country to purchase votingmachines and voter registration database systems. The EAC also has taken over the testing and certifying of America’s voting machinesfrom the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). ButNASED itself, another self-described “nonpartisan nonprofit” group,basically grew out of the Election Center.

Wilkey and Lewis helped to create a self-enclosed system that appointsitself, funds itself, and tests itself, all the while actively ignoringthe realities – the damage – the system is creating.

The Kudzu Effect: How it all began

Think of the Election Center as an incubator for the intertwining ofvendor and voting official, a parasitic vine, like the Japanese kudzu,that destroys democracy as it crosses precinct, county, state, andnational election jurisdictions. This intensely corrupt and eminentlysuccessful integrated effort to privatize voting is spreading worldwidethrough the apparatus of the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES).

It took a well-placed and well-connected operative like Gary Greenhalgh to plant the Kudzu seeds. Greenhalghserved with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) from 1975-1985. Heleft with his FEC co-worker Gwenn Hofmann to create the InternationalCenter on Election Law and Administration (ICELA). Thomas Wilkey’s bioon the EAC site also credits him as a founder, “During 1983 . . . [he]pushed for the creation of the (ICELA).” During the Reagan-Bushadministration, ties were established between the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) and the ICELA. The BSSR provided initial funding to the ICELA.

The Bureau was founded in 1950 as a division of the school of socialsciences and public affairs at American University. It became anonprofit in 1956 and was used as a propaganda tool of the CIA.Its major areas of study included “. . . communication research;international program evaluation; educational research; urban renewaland community relations; military sociology; and the sociology ofoccupations,” according to the Yale University Library. (RoperCollection)

Christopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion(Oxford University Press) documents that “. . . the CIA clandestinelyunderwrote the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) studies oftorture. . . .” CIA expert Alfred McCoy, in his A Question of Torture, notes that the CIA used the BSSR as “One of the main conduits” for torture experiments.

By 1985, the BSSR was faltering financially. Greenhalgh’s communications with Vermont’s Secretary of State Jim Douglasat that time show that Greenhalgh was looking for a new home andfunding for his Center, and would approach George Mason University,(Karl Rove’s alma mater, where Republican strategist Morton Blackwellhosts his infamous Leadership Institute).In 1979, Rove trained at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute. Itsslogan: “For conservatives who want to win.” Blackwell helped co-foundthe influential Christian Right Moral Majority as well as the highly secretive and far-right Council for National Policy.

By 1986, Greenhalgh received funding from the Hewlett, Ford, and JoyceFoundations and established ICELA as the nonprofit “Election Center” aspart of the Academy for State and Local Government.By 1987, the Election Center vendor membership listed Arthur Young,BRC, MicroVote, Douglas Manufacturing, Triad, R. F. Shoup, Sperry Corp,Hart Graphics, and Office Technology Corporation – the major votingmachine vendors of the day.

Certainly Greenhalgh was aware of the potential for fraud and voterigging with the voting machines. An internet search for the ICELAreveals the following 1985 quote posted on the Blackboxvoting site:“‘There is a massive potential for problems,’ said Gary L. Greenhalgh,director of the International Center on Election Law andAdministration, a consulting group in Washington. He added that theproblem with computer-assisted voting systems was that they‘centralized the opportunity for fraud.’”

Roy Saltman, in his 1988 report,“Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote Tallying,”recommended that the fledging Election Center be the “go-to” group forall information on elections and vendors. Saltman’s report offers anearly history of the Election Center: “The Election Center, affiliatedwith the Academy for State and Local Government, was established in1984. The Center is an independent non-profit resource center servingregistration and election officials.”

The initial efforts by the Election Center to network with state andlocal election officials and propagandize for the introduction ofelectronic voting systems in the United States are referenced inSaltman’s report: “The Center has recently distributed the report of aworkshop held on Captiva Island, Florida, in February, 1987. Theworkshop concerned computerized vote-tallying and included, asparticipants, election officials, vendors, computer scientists, andothers interested in the election process.”

Saltman offers this pitch in his report: “Election officials require asource of neutral expertise for the receipt of new technical andadministrative information. The establishment of the Election Center inthe Academy for State and Local Government clearly fulfills a need. Itsefforts should be expanded.”

Ironically, like Greenhalgh, Saltman warned early on about the perils of electronic voting. In his 1975 report, Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote Tallying,he wrote: “Increasing computerization of election-related functions mayresult in the loss of effective control over these functions byresponsible authorities and that this loss of control may increase thepossibility of vote fraud.”

Saltman, a computer scientist then working with the National Bureau ofStandards, also wrote in his August 1988 report that, “Thepossibilities that unknown persons may perpetrate undiscoverablefrauds” was a problem with electronic voting systems.

Ronnie Dugger, in his seminal 1988 New Yorker article,summarized Saltman’s warnings of election tampering such as “. . .altering the computer program or the control punch cards thatmanipulate it, planting a time bomb, manually removing an honestcounting program and replacing it with a fraudulent one, counting fakeballots, altering the vote recorder that voters use at the polls, orchanging either the logic that controls precinct-located vote-countingdevices or the voting summaries in these units’ removable data-storageunits. The problem in this segment of the computer business, as in thefield at large, is not only invisibility but also information aselectricity.”

Greenhalghresigned in 1987 as Director of The Election Center to become the VicePresident of Operations for the R.F. Shoup Companylocated in Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr. Ransom Shoup, thecompany’s namesake, had been convicted in 1979 for conspiring todefraud the federal government in connection with a bribe attempt toobtain voting machine business, according to the Commercial Appealof Memphis. With the Shoup Company under investigation in Tennessee andNew York, in 1989 Greenhalgh left to become president of Shoup’selection machine competitor, MicroVote.

In September 2000, just prior to the contentious presidential election, Greenhalgh emerged as Vice President of Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), one of the big Two, along with Diebold,that electronically counted or calculated most of the votes in the U.S.A recurring theme in Greenhalgh’s writing from the 1980s was how tomake voting accessible for the handicapped. Essentially, the HelpAmerica Vote Act enacted after the Florida 2000election punch card debacle, was sold as a disability rights issue. TheNational Federation for the Blind and other groups, backed by theAmerican Civil Liberties Union, lobbied heavily for touchscreen voting machines in order to ensure access for disabled voters before the 2004 election. The National Federation for the Blind was also backed by Diebold, who donated $1,000,000 for a new facility for the NFB.

Carol Garner took over as the Election Center’s second director in1987. She had previously worked in the office of Bill Clements, Governor of Texas. Future George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove had worked for Clementsin his 1978 gubernatorial campaign and again served as his keypolitical operative in his successful 1986 re-election campaign.

Carol Garner’s Election Center successor, current long-time DirectorDoug Lewis, was also an important figure in the Texas Republican partyin the late 1970s. It was a period of historic growth for the party,which Dick Cheney has referred to as a “new era in Texas politics,” and Lewis served as a fundraiser, campaign manager, and the state Republican party Executive Director. Clements’ predecessor John Connally (seen here at Clements’ inauguration), hired Lewis in 1977 to run his PAC, the John Connally Citizen’s Forum,and later to manage his 1980 presidential bid. All the while Karl Rovewas beginning his meteoric rise as the campaign manager for Republicanswho would win long-held Democratic seats.
Of course, it is Rove’s campaign tactics that “won” George Bush both his presidencies.

The Bush campaigns as covert operations

Take the following quote from the Manchester Union Leaderregarding the 1980 Iowa caucus: “The Bush operation has all the smellof a CIA covert operation . . . strange aspects of the Iowa operation[include] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at avery convenient point, with Bush having a six percent bulge overReagan.”

In 1984, President Reagan signed National Security Directive Decision NSDD245. A year later, the New York Timesexplained the details of Reagan’s secret directive: “A branch of theNational Security Agency is investigating whether a computer programthat counted more than one-third of all the votes cast in the UnitedStates in 1984 is vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation.”

It goes on to say: “Mike Levin, a public information official for theagency’s National Computer Security Center, said the investigation wasinitiated under the authority of a recent presidential directiveordering the center to improve the security of major computer systemsused by the nonmilitary agencies . . . .”

The article goes on to note that: “In 1984, the company’s program[Computer Election System of Berkeley, Calif.] and related equipmentwas used in more than 1,000 county and local jurisdictions to collectand count 34.4 million of the 93.7 million votes cast in the UnitedStates.”

Central tabulating computers were used in an attempt to steal the 1986 electionfor Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a favorite of the Reagan-Bushadministration. This is captured in Hendrick Smith’s book “The Power Game” as well as the video “The Power Game: The Presidency.”

Thus, even prior to the touchscreen computer voting machines, there wasa tradition of suspected election rigging with computer software andcentral tabulators. The actual computer voting machines were introducedon a grand scale in New Hampshire’s 1988 primary. The results werepredictable – former CIA director George H. W. Bush won a huge upset over Dole, but the mainstream for-profit corporate media refused to consider election rigging. Here’s the Washington Post’saccount of the bizarre and unexplainable election results whentouchscreens were first used: In 1988, George H.W. Bush was trailingDole by eight points in the last Gallup poll before the New Hampshireprimary. Bush won by nine points. The Washington Post covered the Bush upset with the following headline: “Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements.”

International intrigue and the IFES

In addition to noting the congruence between the Election Center, FEC and EAC personnel, the Free PressKudzu chart (pgs. 20-21) also notes the CIA-connected IFES“democracy-building” efforts and its intersection with the so-calledElection Center. Under the guise of democratization, these twoorganizations have been the propaganda arm for electronic voting, notonly in the United States, but throughout the world.
TheInternational Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) promotes itself as“the world’s premiere election assistance organization.” The IFES webpage lists more than one hundred countries that it has worked in from Afghanistan to Yemen.

The IFES, founded in 1987, was forged in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal from funds provided by a CIA-connected organization. Documents show it received $125,000 from the scandal-ridden National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in June 1989 to assist the Nicaraguan political opposition to the Sandinistas. William Blum in Killing Hope, quotes NED co-founder Allen Weinstein saying, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Working under the auspices of the Nicaragua Election Monitoring Project of the New York-based Institute for Media Analysis,Inc. ex-contra leader Edgar Chomorro and former CIA analyst DavidMacMichael, echoed Weinsten’s analysis: “NED now carries out overtlythe majority of the CIA’s formerly covert political activities.”
The IFES’s current website states under “Current Projects”that it is “Building Pakistan’s electoral infrastructure inanticipation of elections in late 2007 or early 2008, IFES is workingto strengthen the capacity of the Electoral Commission of Pakistan(ECP) to establish and maintain a credible computerized voter registry. . . .” They will also be offering “technical assistance to theelection commission.”

Accordingto McClatchy newspapers, on December 27, 2007, the day she wasassassinated, “Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidencealleging the involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in riggingthe country’s upcoming elections . . . .” McClatchy reports that,“Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep.Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that themilitary Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] agency was planning to fixthe polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.”
“Bhutto was due to meet Specter and Kennedy after dinner last Thursday.She was shot as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi early thatevening. Pakistan’s government claims instead that she was thrownagainst the lever of her car’s sunroof, fracturing her skull,”according to McClatchy.

McClatchy also reported that Bhutto’s report was “report was ‘verysensitive’ and that the party wanted to initially share it with trustedAmerican politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seenhere as strongly backing Musharraf.”

F. Clifton White,an obscure, highly-connected conservative political operative, was akey force in the development of the IFES. The F. Clifton White Applied Research Center for Democracy and Elections (ARC) is central to the IFES. White died in 1993with a long list of accomplishments. He ran Volunteers for Nixon Lodgein 1960, and created the movement to draft Barry Goldwater forPresident in 1964. He managed Ronald Reagan’s first campaign forPresident in 1968 and in 1980, Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Caseyand soon-to-be CIA director, “summoned White to his side at theirArlington headquarter as one of the two ‘senior advisors’ (the otherwas James Baker),” according to the National Review.

“During the 1980’s White divided his time between his home inGreenwich, Connecticut, an office in Washington from which he directedthe International Foundation for Electoral Systems, an organizationthat explains the techniques of democratic politics to nation’sbelatedly becoming interested in the subject, and the Ashbrook Centerfor Public Affairs at Ashland University in Ohio,” wrote the National Review.

White served on the board of the National Republic Institute for International Affairs,a Republican Party conduit for NED funding and was involved inPresident George H.W. Bush’s efforts to subvert and purchase the 1990Nicaraguan election.

The big electronic push

But the big push for electronic voting came in the wake of thedisastrous 2000 election. Dan Rather’s HDNet investigative report “The Trouble with Touchscreens”suggests that Sequoia Pacific may have been aware of the hanging chadproblem in advance. As one Sequoia employee tells Rather, “My ownpersonal opinion was the touch screen voting system wasn’t getting offthe ground . . . like they would hope. And because they weren’t havingany problems with paper ballots. So, I feel like they – deliberatelydid all this to have problems with the paper ballots so theelectronically voting systems would get off the ground – and which itdid in a big way.”

During the 2000Florida election fiasco, Morton Blackwell described what he saw as thelikely tactics of the Democrats: “These people are basically Leninists.They will stop at nothing to win.” In his assessment, “It could getbloody – figuratively and, I fear, literally.”

Leading the charge for touchscreens was Doug Lewis of the ElectionCenter, who was appointed in December 2000 to the National Elections Standards Task Forceby the National Association of Secretaries of State. As the Kudzu chartindicates, Lewis testified as an “expert” on every single “electionreform” commission or task force post-2000. In 2001, Ohio Secretary ofState and key Bush operative in Florida’s 2000 election J. Kenneth Blackwell, was serving on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) advisory panel where he also pushed electronic voting.

This two-decade-long effort by a small group of conservative Republicanoperatives culminated in the passage of the Help America Vote Act(HAVA) of 2002. HAVA created, among other things, the ElectionAssistance Commission (EAC) where many members of the Kudzu chart cancurrently be found. HAVA also required states to use federal funding toreplace punchcard and levervoting systems with new systems in accordance with HAVA’s voting systemstandards. In Ohio, while owning stock in Diebold, Secretary of StateBlackwell personally negotiated an unbid contract with Diebold to bring touchscreen voting machines into the Buckeye State.

Just prior to the 2006 election, the highly-accurate Columbus Dispatchpoll showed Blackwell losing by 36 points for Governor. Unexplainably,he picked up 12 points a few days later, on Election Day, losing byonly 24 points. Throughout Ohio, Democratic candidates lost 10-12percent of their predicted vote totals. Senator Sherrod Brown, up by24% in the last Dispatch poll, ending up winning by only 12 points.

Overall, we have only begun to scratch the surface of the on-goingscandal of what has been done to the United States and its electoralprocess through the imposition of electronic voting machines. Thevoting-industrial complex has foisted its product on America not onlyfor billions of dollars in profits, but also to turn the political tideof this nation to the Bush family and its minions.

In future articles, we will further explore the spread and impact ofthis phenomenon, and its impact on the decline of our body politic.

Sheri Myers is author of Cheated!and a researcher on the history and politics of electronic votingmachines. Bob Fitrakis is publisher and Harvey Wasserman is senioreditor of www.freepress.org, where their How the GOP Stole the 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008 is available in the Online Store.

The Kudzu Effect is named after a parasitic, rapidly growing vine that engulfs and suffocates the life beneath it. The life of a democracy is embodied by free, honest and verifiable elections.

Computerized voting, promoted by an interlocking cabal of politicaloperatives and vendors is strangling American democracy. According to Election Data Services,almost 80% of all voters in 2006 voted on electronic voting machines oroptically-scanned ballots nationwide. Less than 1% of voters in theU.S. used traditional hand-counted paper ballots.

What has caused this meteoric rise in computerized voting and votecounting where proprietary secrets destroy the transparency of theelection process? A massive public relations campaign by a handful ofstrategically placed individuals has peddled computer voting as thehigh-tech wave of the future.

Tom Wilkey, the Executive Director of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent bipartisan commission created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, is a leading advocate for electronic voting. He told the Los Angeles Timesfollowing the 2006 Congressional elections, that “When you look at asituation [2006 election] where we have 183,000 precincts in thiscountry, there have been very, very few problems proportionately.”Wilkey also administered the testing and certifying of voting machinesthrough NASED, the National Association of State Election Directors.

Another key proponent is Doug Lewis, the director of the Houston-based Election Center, whom David Broder of the Washington Post describes as, “the man who knows more about the conduct of elections than anyone else in the country.” Lewis gushed in USA Today:“It looks like it [2006 election] actually went better than everybodyexpected. My God, it’s a big country, and you’d expect some glitches.”

In reality, there were significant electronic voting problems in the2006 election all over the country. As Ellen Theisen, founder of Voters Unite!,points out “What if voting machines failed at thousands of pollingplaces in over half the states, and the problems caused such severedelays in eight states that voting hours were extended? Is that ‘just afew glitches?’”

Here in Ohio and across thenation, the electronic voting machines recorded statistically unlikelyundervotes. In a hotly contested Congressional electionin Sarasota, Florida, the machines recorded that 13%, or 18,000 of thevotes, failed to register in a race decided by 368 votes. In Montgomery County, Ohio, some 30,000 votes failed to record in the U.S. Senate race because of improper touchscreen machine “calibration.” In Franklin County, Ohio,a Domestic Relations judicial race produced more than 22,000 unexpectedundervotes. A recount and court hearing proved that it was impossibleto audit the electronic machines that “glitched.”

Ohio machines deemed vulnerable

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s much-anticipated studyfound Ohio’s election system riddled with “critical security failures.”Released in December 2007, after attempts by the Republican-dominatedlegislature to block the funding, the review showed massive problemsinvolved with electronic voting systems. The corporate vendor-connectedMicrosolved,Inc. concluded as part of the study that Ohio’s computer voting machinevendors have “failed to adopt, implement and follow industry-standardbest practices in the development of the system.” Among them, accordingto the independent academics who wrote a different section of thereport, was the “pervasive misapplication of security technology.”
They specifically cited the lack of “standard and well-known practicesfor the use of cryptology, key and password management and securityhardware.” The academics went on to describe computer voting softwarepractices as “deeply flawed.” The result leads to “fragile software inwhich exploitable crashes, lockups, and failures are common in normaluse.”

Paperless voting machines to be replaced

Earlier in 2007, Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist and the State legislature agreed to ban direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting systems. After extensive testing in California, Secretary of State (SoS) Debra Bowen,announced that DRE voting systems made by Sequoia and Diebold would bebanned from use. Bowen’s testing prompted her Colorado counterpart, Mike Coffman,to decertify many of his state’s e-voting systems. Rather than installcomputerized vote counting machines with known system failures andsecurity inadequacies, New York State has refused to “improve” its lever-based voting machinery by going electronic and as a result faces a federal lawsuit.

Bo Lipari, executive director of New Yorkers for Verified Votingasserts, “State after state which adopted electronic touch screen DREsare now abandoning them for paper ballots and ballot scanners. DREscannot and do not protect our right to vote.”

It is becoming clear that the “Help America Vote Act of 2002″ (HAVA),the broadest voting reform effort of the past generation, created inthe response to the “hanging chads” of the 2000 election, is a $4billion boondoggle. The legislation, is called the “Hack America VoteAct” by election integrity activists, or the “Help America’s VendorsAct.” And vendor-abetting is what Lewis’ Election Center is all about.
Who are Wilkey & Lewis?

A look at the top two entries on the Kudzu Chart(pp. 20-21 of this issue) documents that Wilkey and Lewis have beeninstrumental in the extremely successful, well-coordinated plan to handU.S. elections, the voters, and the future of this nation over to whatcan only be described as a voting industrial complex: a privatized,for-profit system controlled by the voting machine equipment vendors inalliance with their key allies – neo-con ideologues and the military-and security-industrial elite.

An investigation headed by Sheri Myers and the Free Pressof Wilkey and Lewis, documents that they have used the cover of the“nonprofit, nonpartisan” Election Center to: create a nexus forelection officials and the vendors to conspire to push electronicvoting, take over the testing and certifying of the voting machines onbehalf of the vendors, and assume control of U.S. elections through theElection Assistance Commission.
Another look at the Kudzu Chart, comparing the involvement in columns 2and 22, reveals that a core group of electronic voting advocates cameout of the Election Center and now essentially run the EAC. (For biosof the players, go to: www/freepress.org) The EAC was charged by HAVAto distribute billions of dollars around the country to purchase votingmachines and voter registration database systems. The EAC also has taken over the testing and certifying of America’s voting machinesfrom the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). ButNASED itself, another self-described “nonpartisan nonprofit” group,basically grew out of the Election Center.

Wilkey and Lewis helped to create a self-enclosed system that appointsitself, funds itself, and tests itself, all the while actively ignoringthe realities – the damage – the system is creating.

The Kudzu Effect: How it all began

Think of the Election Center as an incubator for the intertwining ofvendor and voting official, a parasitic vine, like the Japanese kudzu,that destroys democracy as it crosses precinct, county, state, andnational election jurisdictions. This intensely corrupt and eminentlysuccessful integrated effort to privatize voting is spreading worldwidethrough the apparatus of the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES).

It took a well-placed and well-connected operative like Gary Greenhalgh to plant the Kudzu seeds. Greenhalghserved with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) from 1975-1985. Heleft with his FEC co-worker Gwenn Hofmann to create the InternationalCenter on Election Law and Administration (ICELA). Thomas Wilkey’s bioon the EAC site also credits him as a founder, “During 1983 . . . [he]pushed for the creation of the (ICELA).” During the Reagan-Bushadministration, ties were established between the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) and the ICELA. The BSSR provided initial funding to the ICELA.

The Bureau was founded in 1950 as a division of the school of socialsciences and public affairs at American University. It became anonprofit in 1956 and was used as a propaganda tool of the CIA.Its major areas of study included “. . . communication research;international program evaluation; educational research; urban renewaland community relations; military sociology; and the sociology ofoccupations,” according to the Yale University Library. (RoperCollection)

Christopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion(Oxford University Press) documents that “. . . the CIA clandestinelyunderwrote the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) studies oftorture. . . .” CIA expert Alfred McCoy, in his A Question of Torture, notes that the CIA used the BSSR as “One of the main conduits” for torture experiments.

By 1985, the BSSR was faltering financially. Greenhalgh’s communications with Vermont’s Secretary of State Jim Douglasat that time show that Greenhalgh was looking for a new home andfunding for his Center, and would approach George Mason University,(Karl Rove’s alma mater, where Republican strategist Morton Blackwellhosts his infamous Leadership Institute).In 1979, Rove trained at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute. Itsslogan: “For conservatives who want to win.” Blackwell helped co-foundthe influential Christian Right Moral Majority as well as the highly secretive and far-right Council for National Policy.

By 1986, Greenhalgh received funding from the Hewlett, Ford, and JoyceFoundations and established ICELA as the nonprofit “Election Center” aspart of the Academy for State and Local Government.By 1987, the Election Center vendor membership listed Arthur Young,BRC, MicroVote, Douglas Manufacturing, Triad, R. F. Shoup, Sperry Corp,Hart Graphics, and Office Technology Corporation – the major votingmachine vendors of the day.

Certainly Greenhalgh was aware of the potential for fraud and voterigging with the voting machines. An internet search for the ICELAreveals the following 1985 quote posted on the Blackboxvoting site:“‘There is a massive potential for problems,’ said Gary L. Greenhalgh,director of the International Center on Election Law andAdministration, a consulting group in Washington. He added that theproblem with computer-assisted voting systems was that they‘centralized the opportunity for fraud.’”

Roy Saltman, in his 1988 report,“Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote Tallying,”recommended that the fledging Election Center be the “go-to” group forall information on elections and vendors. Saltman’s report offers anearly history of the Election Center: “The Election Center, affiliatedwith the Academy for State and Local Government, was established in1984. The Center is an independent non-profit resource center servingregistration and election officials.”

The initial efforts by the Election Center to network with state andlocal election officials and propagandize for the introduction ofelectronic voting systems in the United States are referenced inSaltman’s report: “The Center has recently distributed the report of aworkshop held on Captiva Island, Florida, in February, 1987. Theworkshop concerned computerized vote-tallying and included, asparticipants, election officials, vendors, computer scientists, andothers interested in the election process.”

Saltman offers this pitch in his report: “Election officials require asource of neutral expertise for the receipt of new technical andadministrative information. The establishment of the Election Center inthe Academy for State and Local Government clearly fulfills a need. Itsefforts should be expanded.”

Ironically, like Greenhalgh, Saltman warned early on about the perils of electronic voting. In his 1975 report, Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote Tallying,he wrote: “Increasing computerization of election-related functions mayresult in the loss of effective control over these functions byresponsible authorities and that this loss of control may increase thepossibility of vote fraud.”

Saltman, a computer scientist then working with the National Bureau ofStandards, also wrote in his August 1988 report that, “Thepossibilities that unknown persons may perpetrate undiscoverablefrauds” was a problem with electronic voting systems.

Ronnie Dugger, in his seminal 1988 New Yorker article,summarized Saltman’s warnings of election tampering such as “. . .altering the computer program or the control punch cards thatmanipulate it, planting a time bomb, manually removing an honestcounting program and replacing it with a fraudulent one, counting fakeballots, altering the vote recorder that voters use at the polls, orchanging either the logic that controls precinct-located vote-countingdevices or the voting summaries in these units’ removable data-storageunits. The problem in this segment of the computer business, as in thefield at large, is not only invisibility but also information aselectricity.”

Greenhalghresigned in 1987 as Director of The Election Center to become the VicePresident of Operations for the R.F. Shoup Companylocated in Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr. Ransom Shoup, thecompany’s namesake, had been convicted in 1979 for conspiring todefraud the federal government in connection with a bribe attempt toobtain voting machine business, according to the Commercial Appealof Memphis. With the Shoup Company under investigation in Tennessee andNew York, in 1989 Greenhalgh left to become president of Shoup’selection machine competitor, MicroVote.

In September 2000, just prior to the contentious presidential election, Greenhalgh emerged as Vice President of Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), one of the big Two, along with Diebold,that electronically counted or calculated most of the votes in the U.S.A recurring theme in Greenhalgh’s writing from the 1980s was how tomake voting accessible for the handicapped. Essentially, the HelpAmerica Vote Act enacted after the Florida 2000election punch card debacle, was sold as a disability rights issue. TheNational Federation for the Blind and other groups, backed by theAmerican Civil Liberties Union, lobbied heavily for touchscreen voting machines in order to ensure access for disabled voters before the 2004 election. The National Federation for the Blind was also backed by Diebold, who donated $1,000,000 for a new facility for the NFB.

Carol Garner took over as the Election Center’s second director in1987. She had previously worked in the office of Bill Clements, Governor of Texas. Future George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove had worked for Clementsin his 1978 gubernatorial campaign and again served as his keypolitical operative in his successful 1986 re-election campaign.

Carol Garner’s Election Center successor, current long-time DirectorDoug Lewis, was also an important figure in the Texas Republican partyin the late 1970s. It was a period of historic growth for the party,which Dick Cheney has referred to as a “new era in Texas politics,” and Lewis served as a fundraiser, campaign manager, and the state Republican party Executive Director. Clements’ predecessor John Connally (seen here at Clements’ inauguration), hired Lewis in 1977 to run his PAC, the John Connally Citizen’s Forum,and later to manage his 1980 presidential bid. All the while Karl Rovewas beginning his meteoric rise as the campaign manager for Republicanswho would win long-held Democratic seats.
Of course, it is Rove’s campaign tactics that “won” George Bush both his presidencies.

The Bush campaigns as covert operations

Take the following quote from the Manchester Union Leaderregarding the 1980 Iowa caucus: “The Bush operation has all the smellof a CIA covert operation . . . strange aspects of the Iowa operation[include] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at avery convenient point, with Bush having a six percent bulge overReagan.”

In 1984, President Reagan signed National Security Directive Decision NSDD245. A year later, the New York Timesexplained the details of Reagan’s secret directive: “A branch of theNational Security Agency is investigating whether a computer programthat counted more than one-third of all the votes cast in the UnitedStates in 1984 is vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation.”

It goes on to say: “Mike Levin, a public information official for theagency’s National Computer Security Center, said the investigation wasinitiated under the authority of a recent presidential directiveordering the center to improve the security of major computer systemsused by the nonmilitary agencies . . . .”

The article goes on to note that: “In 1984, the company’s program[Computer Election System of Berkeley, Calif.] and related equipmentwas used in more than 1,000 county and local jurisdictions to collectand count 34.4 million of the 93.7 million votes cast in the UnitedStates.”

Central tabulating computers were used in an attempt to steal the 1986 electionfor Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a favorite of the Reagan-Bushadministration. This is captured in Hendrick Smith’s book “The Power Game” as well as the video “The Power Game: The Presidency.”

Thus, even prior to the touchscreen computer voting machines, there wasa tradition of suspected election rigging with computer software andcentral tabulators. The actual computer voting machines were introducedon a grand scale in New Hampshire’s 1988 primary. The results werepredictable – former CIA director George H. W. Bush won a huge upset over Dole, but the mainstream for-profit corporate media refused to consider election rigging. Here’s the Washington Post’saccount of the bizarre and unexplainable election results whentouchscreens were first used: In 1988, George H.W. Bush was trailingDole by eight points in the last Gallup poll before the New Hampshireprimary. Bush won by nine points. The Washington Post covered the Bush upset with the following headline: “Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements.”

International intrigue and the IFES

In addition to noting the congruence between the Election Center, FEC and EAC personnel, the Free PressKudzu chart (pgs. 20-21) also notes the CIA-connected IFES“democracy-building” efforts and its intersection with the so-calledElection Center. Under the guise of democratization, these twoorganizations have been the propaganda arm for electronic voting, notonly in the United States, but throughout the world.
TheInternational Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) promotes itself as“the world’s premiere election assistance organization.” The IFES webpage lists more than one hundred countries that it has worked in from Afghanistan to Yemen.

The IFES, founded in 1987, was forged in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal from funds provided by a CIA-connected organization. Documents show it received $125,000 from the scandal-ridden National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in June 1989 to assist the Nicaraguan political opposition to the Sandinistas. William Blum in Killing Hope, quotes NED co-founder Allen Weinstein saying, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Working under the auspices of the Nicaragua Election Monitoring Project of the New York-based Institute for Media Analysis,Inc. ex-contra leader Edgar Chomorro and former CIA analyst DavidMacMichael, echoed Weinsten’s analysis: “NED now carries out overtlythe majority of the CIA’s formerly covert political activities.”
The IFES’s current website states under “Current Projects”that it is “Building Pakistan’s electoral infrastructure inanticipation of elections in late 2007 or early 2008, IFES is workingto strengthen the capacity of the Electoral Commission of Pakistan(ECP) to establish and maintain a credible computerized voter registry. . . .” They will also be offering “technical assistance to theelection commission.”

Accordingto McClatchy newspapers, on December 27, 2007, the day she wasassassinated, “Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidencealleging the involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in riggingthe country’s upcoming elections . . . .” McClatchy reports that,“Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep.Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that themilitary Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] agency was planning to fixthe polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.”
“Bhutto was due to meet Specter and Kennedy after dinner last Thursday.She was shot as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi early thatevening. Pakistan’s government claims instead that she was thrownagainst the lever of her car’s sunroof, fracturing her skull,”according to McClatchy.

McClatchy also reported that Bhutto’s report was “report was ‘verysensitive’ and that the party wanted to initially share it with trustedAmerican politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seenhere as strongly backing Musharraf.”

F. Clifton White,an obscure, highly-connected conservative political operative, was akey force in the development of the IFES. The F. Clifton White Applied Research Center for Democracy and Elections (ARC) is central to the IFES. White died in 1993with a long list of accomplishments. He ran Volunteers for Nixon Lodgein 1960, and created the movement to draft Barry Goldwater forPresident in 1964. He managed Ronald Reagan’s first campaign forPresident in 1968 and in 1980, Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Caseyand soon-to-be CIA director, “summoned White to his side at theirArlington headquarter as one of the two ‘senior advisors’ (the otherwas James Baker),” according to the National Review.

“During the 1980’s White divided his time between his home inGreenwich, Connecticut, an office in Washington from which he directedthe International Foundation for Electoral Systems, an organizationthat explains the techniques of democratic politics to nation’sbelatedly becoming interested in the subject, and the Ashbrook Centerfor Public Affairs at Ashland University in Ohio,” wrote the National Review.

White served on the board of the National Republic Institute for International Affairs,a Republican Party conduit for NED funding and was involved inPresident George H.W. Bush’s efforts to subvert and purchase the 1990Nicaraguan election.

The big electronic push

But the big push for electronic voting came in the wake of thedisastrous 2000 election. Dan Rather’s HDNet investigative report “The Trouble with Touchscreens”suggests that Sequoia Pacific may have been aware of the hanging chadproblem in advance. As one Sequoia employee tells Rather, “My ownpersonal opinion was the touch screen voting system wasn’t getting offthe ground . . . like they would hope. And because they weren’t havingany problems with paper ballots. So, I feel like they – deliberatelydid all this to have problems with the paper ballots so theelectronically voting systems would get off the ground – and which itdid in a big way.”

During the 2000Florida election fiasco, Morton Blackwell described what he saw as thelikely tactics of the Democrats: “These people are basically Leninists.They will stop at nothing to win.” In his assessment, “It could getbloody – figuratively and, I fear, literally.”

Leading the charge for touchscreens was Doug Lewis of the ElectionCenter, who was appointed in December 2000 to the National Elections Standards Task Forceby the National Association of Secretaries of State. As the Kudzu chartindicates, Lewis testified as an “expert” on every single “electionreform” commission or task force post-2000. In 2001, Ohio Secretary ofState and key Bush operative in Florida’s 2000 election J. Kenneth Blackwell, was serving on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) advisory panel where he also pushed electronic voting.

This two-decade-long effort by a small group of conservative Republicanoperatives culminated in the passage of the Help America Vote Act(HAVA) of 2002. HAVA created, among other things, the ElectionAssistance Commission (EAC) where many members of the Kudzu chart cancurrently be found. HAVA also required states to use federal funding toreplace punchcard and levervoting systems with new systems in accordance with HAVA’s voting systemstandards. In Ohio, while owning stock in Diebold, Secretary of StateBlackwell personally negotiated an unbid contract with Diebold to bring touchscreen voting machines into the Buckeye State.

Just prior to the 2006 election, the highly-accurate Columbus Dispatchpoll showed Blackwell losing by 36 points for Governor. Unexplainably,he picked up 12 points a few days later, on Election Day, losing byonly 24 points. Throughout Ohio, Democratic candidates lost 10-12percent of their predicted vote totals. Senator Sherrod Brown, up by24% in the last Dispatch poll, ending up winning by only 12 points.

Overall, we have only begun to scratch the surface of the on-goingscandal of what has been done to the United States and its electoralprocess through the imposition of electronic voting machines. Thevoting-industrial complex has foisted its product on America not onlyfor billions of dollars in profits, but also to turn the political tideof this nation to the Bush family and its minions.

In future articles, we will further explore the spread and impact ofthis phenomenon, and its impact on the decline of our body politic.

Sheri Myers is author of Cheated!and a researcher on the history and politics of electronic votingmachines. Bob Fitrakis is publisher and Harvey Wasserman is senioreditor of www.freepress.org, where their How the GOP Stole the 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008 is available in the Online Store.

The Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and other prominent state officials, commute to their downtown Columbus offices on Broad Street. This is the so-called “Golden Finger,” the safe route through the majority black inner-city near east side. The Broad Street BP station, just east of downtown, is the place where affluent suburbanites from Bexley can stop, gas up, get their coffee and New York Times. Those in need of cash visit BP’s Diebold manufactured CashSource+ ATM machine which provides a paper receipt of the transaction to all customers upon request.

Many of Taft’s and President George W. Bush’s major donors, like Diebold’s current CEO Walden “Wally” O’Dell, reside in Columbus’ northwest suburb Upper Arlington. O’Dell is on record stating that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President” this year. On September 26, 2003, he hosted an Ohio Republican Party fundraiser for Bush’s re-election at his Cotswold Manor mansion. Tickets to the fundraiser cost $1000 per couple, but O’Dell’s fundraising letter urged those attending to “Donate or raise $10,000 for the Ohio Republican Party.”

According to the Columbus Dispatch: “Last year, O’Dell and his wife Patricia, campaigned for passage of two liquor options that made their portion of Tremont Road wet.

On November 5, Upper Arlington residents narrowly passed measures that allowed fundraising parties to offer more than beer, even though his 10,800-square-foot home is a residence, a permit is required because alcohol is included in the price of fundraising tickets. O’Dell is also allowed to serve “beer, wine and mixed drinks” at Sunday fundraisers.

O’Dell’s fund-raising letter followed on the heels of a visit to President Bush’s Crawford Texas ranch by “Pioneers and Rangers,” the designation for people who had raised $100,000 or more for Bush’s re-election.

If Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has his way, Diebold will receive a contract to supply touch screen electronic voting machines for much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will provide a paper receipt of the vote.

Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its primary business in ATM and ticket-vending machines. Critics of Diebold point out that virtually every other machine the company makes provides a paper trail to verify the machine’s calculations. Oddly, only the voting machines lack this essential function.

State Senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo introduced Senate Bill 167 late last year mandating that every voting machine in Ohio generate a “voter verified paper audit trail.” Secretary of State Blackwell has denounced any attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to “derail” election reform. Blackwell’s political career is an interesting one: he emerged as a black activist in Cincinnati supporting municipal charter reform, became an elected Democrat, then an Independent, and now is a prominent Republican with his eyes on the Governor’s mansion.

Voter fraud

A joint study by the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology following the 2000 election determined that between 1.5 and 2 million votes were not counted due to confusing paper ballots or faulty equipment. The federal government’s solution to the problem was to pass the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

One of the law’s stated goals was “Replacement of punch card and lever voting machines.” The new voting machines would be high-tech touch screen computers, but if there’s no paper trail, how do you know if there’s been a computer glitch? How can the results be trusted? And how do you recount to see if the actual votes match the computer’s tally?

Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, argues that without a paper trail, these machines are open to massive voter fraud. Diebold has already placed some 50,000 machines in 37 states and their track record is causing Harris, Johns Hopkins University professors and others great concern.

Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold’s electronic voting software contained “stunning flaws.” The researchers concluded that vote totals could be altered at the voting machines and by remote access. Diebold vigorously refuted the Johns Hopkins report, claiming the researchers came to “a multitude of false conclusions.”

Perhaps to settle the issue, apparently an insider leaked documents from the Diebold Election Systems website and posted internal documents from the company to Harris’ website. Diebold went to court to stop, according to court records, the “wholesale reproduction” of some 13,000 pages of company material.

The Associated Press reported in November 2003 that: “Computer programmers, ISPs and students at [at] least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received cease and desist letters” from Diebold. A group of Swarthmore College students launched an “electronic civil disobedience” campaign to keep the hacked documents permanently posted on the Internet.

Harris writes that the documents expose how the mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al Gore as winner of Florida after someone “subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in still some undefined way, added 4000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush.” Hours later, the votes were returned. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now Diebold, reads: “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.” Another hacked internal memo, written by Talbot Iredale, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold Election Systems, documents “unauthorized” replacement votes in Volusia County.

Harris also uncovered a revealing 87-page CBS news report and noted, “According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible to calling the election for Bush.” The first person to call the election for Bush was Fox election analyst John Ellis, who had the advantage of conferring with his prominent cousins George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Incestuous relationships

Increasingly, investigative writers seeking an explanation have looked to Diebold’s history for clues. The electronic voting industry is dominated by only a few corporations – Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Diebold and ES&S combined count an estimated 80% of U.S. black box electronic votes.

In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family’s ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported, “. . . primarily funded by evangelical Christians – particularly the wealthy Ahmanson family of Irvine – the [Discovery] institute’s $1-million annual program has produced 25 books, a stream of conferences and more than 100 fellowships for doctoral and postdoctoral research.” The chief philanthropists of the Discovery Institute, that pushes creationist science and education in California, are Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more forthcoming on Ahmanson’s politics.

“On the right, figures such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard Ahmanson have given hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades to political projects both high (setting up the Heritage Foundation think-tank, the driving engine of the Reagan presidency) and low (bankrolling investigations into President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions and the suicide of the White House insider Vincent Foster),” wrote The Independent last November.

The Sunday Mail described an individual as, “. . . a fundamentalist Christian more in the mould of U.S. multi-millionaire Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who uses his fortune to promote so-called traditional family values . . . by waving fortunes under their noses, Ahmanson has the ability to cajole candidates into backing his right-wing Christian agenda.

Ahmanson is also a chief contributor to the Chalcedon Institute that supports the Christian reconstruction movement. The movement’s philosophy advocates, among other things, “mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards.”

The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based election company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners was Carolyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil family, which supplied much of the original money for the Council on National Policy.

In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election where the votes were verified by the company he served as chairman and maintained a financial investment. In both the 1996 and 2002 elections, Hagel’s ES&S counted an estimated 80% of his winning votes. Due to the contracting out of services, confidentiality agreements between the State of Nebraska and the company kept this matter out of the public eye. Hagel’s first election victory was described as a “stunning upset” by one Nebraska newspaper.

Hagel’s official biography states, “Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate, Hagel worked in the private sector as the President of McCarthy and Company, an investment banking firm based in Omaha, Nebraska and served as Chairman of the Board of American Information Systems.” During the first Bush presidency, Hagel served as Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations (G-7 Summit).

Bob Urosevich was the Programmer and CEO at AIS, before being replaced by Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold Election Systems and his brother Todd is a top executive at ES&S. Bob created Diebold’s original electronic voting machine software. Thus, the brothers Urosevich, originally funded by the far Right, figure in the counting of approximately 80% of electronic voting in the United States.

Like Ohio, the State of Maryland was disturbed by the potential for massive electronic voter fraud. The voters of that state were reassured when the state hired SAIC to monitor Diebold’s system. SAIC’s former CEO is Admiral Bill Owens. Owens served as a military aide to both Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who now works with George H.W. Bush at the controversial Carlyle Group. Robert Gates, former CIA Director and close friend of the Bush family, also served on the SAIC Board.

Diebold’s track record

Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow. Alastair Thompson, writing for scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elections were “fixed by electronic voting machines supplied by Republican-affiliated companies.” The scoop investigation concluded that: “The state where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with the most electronic voting machines.” Those machines were supplied by Diebold.

Wired News reported that “. . . a former worker in Diebold’s Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machine before the state’s 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials.” Questions were raised in Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County each received exactly the same number of votes – 18,181 – on ES&S machines.

Following the 2003 California election, an audit of the company revealed that Diebold Election Systems voting machines installed uncertified software in all 17 counties using its equipment.

Former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell writes that one of the favorite tactics of the CIA during the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s was to control countries by manipulating the election process. “CIA apologists leap up and say, ‘Well, most of these things are not so bloody.’ And that’s true. You’re giving politicians some money so he’ll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it’s still illegal intervention in other country’s affairs, raising the question of whether or not we’re going to have a world in which laws, rules of behavior are respected,” Stockwell wrote. Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush administration supported computer manipulation in both Noriega’s rise to power in Panama and in Marcos’ attempt to retain power in the Philippines. Many of the Reagan administration’s staunchest supporters were members of the Council on National Policy.

The perfect solution

Ohio Senator Fedor continues to fight valiantly for Senate Bill 167 and the Holy Grail of the “voter verified paper audit trail.” Proponents of a paper trail were emboldened when Athan Gibbs, President and CEO of TruVote International, demonstrated a voting machine at a vendor’s fair in Columbus that provides two separate voting receipts.

The first paper receipt displays the voter’s touch screen selection under plexiglass that falls into a lockbox after the voter approves. Also, the TruVote system provides the voter with a receipt that includes a unique voter ID and pin number which can be used to call in to a voter audit internet connection to make sure the vote cast was actually counted.

Brooks Thomas, Coordinator of Elections in Tennessee, stated, “I’ve not seen anything that compares to the Gibbs’ TruVote validation system. . . .” The Assistant Secretary of State of Georgia, Terrel L. Slayton, Jr., claimed Gibbs had come up with the “perfect solution.”

Still, there remains opposition from Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell. His spokesperson Carlo LoParo recently pointed out that federal mandates under HAVA do not require a paper trail: “. . . if Congress changes the federal law to require it [a paper trail], we’ll certainly make that a requirement of our efforts.” LoParo went on to accuse advocates of a paper trail of attempting to “derail” voting reform.

U.S. Representative Rush Holt introduced HR 2239, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, that would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail so that voters may verify that their screen touches match their actual vote. Election officials would also have a paper trail for recounts.

As Blackwell pressures the Ohio legislature to adopt electronic voting machines without a paper trail, Athan Gibbs wonders, “Why would you buy a voting machine from a company like Diebold which provides a paper trail for every single machine it makes except its voting machines? And then, when you ask it to verify its numbers, it hides behind ‘trade secrets.’”

Maybe the Diebold decision makes sense, if you believe, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, that democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.

Dr. Bob Fitrakis is Senior Editor of The Free Press (http://freepress.org), a political science professor, and author of numerous articles and books.

Barack Obama is heading to Election Day with a razor thin 6 point lead in the popular polls in Ohio, according to the usually reliable Columbus Dispatch poll. This means that the Buckeye state could again decide who enters the White House in January, despite the fact that nationwide Obama’s lead has been registered as high as 11-12 percent.

In a country with truly fair elections, a reliable vote count, and no electoral college, such a lead should be commanding.

But in the America of 2008, it will be enough only if tens of thousands of grassroots election protection activists, rallied primarily through the independent internet, can protect voter registrations, guarantee the ability to vote at the polling stations, and somehow procure an accurate, un-tampered with vote count.

In short, it will depend on YOU and your willingness to protect American democracy. It will not be the punditocracy or the campaign managers who decide Tuesday’s outcome—it will be the get-out-the-vote activists, the poll workers, the monitors and observers, the election protection attorneys, the video-the-voters, and the vote count investigators. Will you be among them?

The story of the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004 is now all too familiar. Three stolen Senatorial races in 2002 gave George W. Bush pivotal clout to wage a catastrophic war and destroy the American economy. In 2006 Democrats made substantial gains in Congress, but were denied numerous additional seats in races where they failed miserably to protect the franchise. Voters in Ohio elected a new governor and secretary of state, but only by overcoming the loss of 12% of the vote predicted by pre-election polls. The votes were stolen by disenfranchisement and electronic “irregularities” or “glitches.”

Throughout the decade the election protection movement has been sustained by the internet. Both the Democratic Party and the corporate media have avoided the question of stolen elections like the plague. Last month the “left” media again attacked grassroots election protection as Andrew Gumbel wrote contemptuously in The Nation Magazine of “underqualified” internet reporters who “breathlessly” document the Bush/Rove larceny.

That means YOU.

Now the Democrats are e-mailing appeals for election protection monitors. Through a message from Florida Congresswomen Deborah Wasserman-Schulz (no relation), the Democrats are raising money for a vaguely defined “protect the vote” effort, ignoring the fact that John Kerry raised $7 million for such an effort in 2004, then walked away from the election. A Democrat video refers to the nightmare of Florida 2000 and “stories” heard about Ohio 2004. James Carville, who loudly threw in the towel from his televised bloviator perch in 2004 while 250,000 votes were still uncounted in Ohio, has also jumped on the election protection bandwagon.

Maybe this year the Democrats will actually do something about protecting the vote. Maybe, if they carry the White House, they will actually correct some of the abuses that put George W. Bush in power, as some have begun to do in Ohio and elsewhere. After all, election irregularities will not only affect Obama, they’ve already affected Oprah.

But ultimately there is only one way Tuesday’s vote will be protected—-if thousands of committed, independent public citizens show up at the polls with your cameras, your note pads, your cell phones and your lawyers, bound and determined to protect this election.

If you’re electronic vote on a computerized voting machine starts hopping from your candidate to another, or just fades away and pollworkers do nothing—we’re asking voters to dial 911 and make an emergency report on felony election tampering. Demand that the malfunctioning machine be immediately quarantined as a crime scene.

If Obama wins, the doubters and deceivers will cry “no wolf” in reverse, and dismiss the efforts of those who have written, organized and shown up at the polls to protect the vote. “He would have won anyway,” they’ll say.

But we will know otherwise. Only if YOU turn up Tuesday will the networks be discussing a McCain/Palin defeat on Wednesday.

If we see you at the polls on Tuesday, we can all share in an internet-based victory party on Wednesday.

Then we can spend the rest of the century working to guarantee that nothing like the Bush nightmare can ever happen again.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, and AS GOES OHIO, available at www.freepress.org, where this first appeared.

Obama supporters are exuding a potentially fatal air of confidence and expectation. Intoxicated by favorable polls and a gusher of campaign spending, many are, in John McCain’s phrase, “measuring the drapes in the White House.”

It is a classic error, made lethal by the Democratic Party’s on-going unwillingness to face the realities of electronic election theft.

In fact, the twin towers of pre-election disenfranchisement and rigged electronic vote counts make an Obama victory at best an even call, no matter how far ahead he may seem in the polls.

As reported by Bradblog, Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy, Mark C. Miller and others, the Republicans are waging all-out war to purge hundreds of thousands of Democrats from the voter rolls. The now-familiar attacks on ACORN are a smokescreen to cover highly effective state-by-state assaults on computerized registration lists. These lists are often privatized and run by Republican-connected companies like Triad in Ohio.

As Palast reported eight years ago, such tactics effectively removed tens of thousands of "ex-felons" (many of whom were no such thing) from Florida voter rolls in an election decided for George W. Bush by a fraudulent official margin of less than 600 votes.

Since 2005, at least another 170,000 voters have been removed from the rolls in Franklin County (Columbus), 94,000 in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and 58,000 in Montgomery County (Dayton) according to public records obtained by the Free Press.

Also, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner effectively halted the purging of 600,000 additional existing voters by directing that all purged voters be given notification and a hearing. The Republican Party has sued repeatedly to remove another 200,000 new voters that have been registered since January 1, 2008.

An estimated 75-80% of these new registrations are thought to be Obama supporters. The Republican challenge in Ohio is based on so-called "mismatches" in a database. For example, a mismatch could merely be the lack of a middle initial for a voter’s name on their voter registration when matched with records from the Social Security administration, Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Ohio Secretary of State or lists maintained by private vendors for the counties.

As reported at Freepress.org, the GOP disenfranchised at least 308,000 Ohio voters (of 5.4 million) prior to a 2004 election decided by a fraudulent official margin of less than 119,000. At least another 170,000 have since been removed.

Now the Republicans are using a compendium of tactics to do the same in other key states, much of which is being reported at Bradblog.org and elsewhere.

Though they are meeting grassroots resistance in many cases, the combination of secret computerized manipulations and outright intimidation is certain to cost the Democrats hundreds of thousands of votes in the swing states that will decide the election. As in 2000 and 2004, with scant exception the Democrats are doing little or nothing to stop the slaughter.

Likewise electronic voting machines. As amply demonstrated in studies at Princeton University, the Government Accountability Office, the Carter-Baker Commission, the Brennan Center, by Bev Harris at Black Box Voting, and elsewhere, electronic voting machines are perfectly designed to foster election theft.

Steve Spoonamore, one of the world’s leading experts on computer data fraud and expert witness in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville vs. Blackwell case against the state of Ohio, has provided an affidavit declaring the Ohio electronic voting system vulnerable to tampering. This aligns with the results of the Everest study commissioned by Secretary of State Brunner that found Ohio’s voting machines easily hackable and the electronic pollbooks even more vulnerable, lacking any real security protocols.

As in Youngstown and Columbus in 2004, we are already witnessing across the nation widespread touchscreen "anomalies" in which voters press Obama’s name and other candidates light up. CNN has been forced to report on the vote flipping phenomenon. Election officials have rushed to explain it away with such bizarre reasons such as the use of hand lotion, latent fingerprint shadows on the touchscreen, and ignorant voters. Recently, Greene County, Ohio pollworkers told the Free Press that election officials have simply instructed them to wipe down the screens at 11am an 4pm if the votes are hopping.

Vote shifting has also surfaced where citizens attempt to select a straight party ticket. Even during less pressured advance balloting, machines are breaking down, causing delays and opening wide the door to theft and fraud. The magic word "recalibration" has come to mean mid-stream re-rigging of electronic machines, and is being strategically conjured in voting booths throughout the nation.

The antidote is clear: paper ballots must be made universal. In Ohio, Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has attempted to make this happen, but has been beaten back by Republicans. Maryland and Virginia have announced they will return to paper ballots, but AFTER this year’s election. In Pennsylvania, a Democratic Secretary of State has, incredibly, RESISTED making paper ballots universally available in a state now dominated by electronic machines without paper trails. It should be no surprise that the McCain campaign is now insisting that Pennsylvania is still "in play" despite a double-digit lead in the polls by his opponent, Senator Barack Obama.

On last Sunday’s (Oct. 26) Meet the Press program, NBC news political reporter Kelly O’Donnell’s comments provided the narrative for another potential election larceny in 2008. She commented on the McCain campaign and Republicans: "…they are looking at Pennsylvania. They see Pennsylvania differently than the pollsters and the Democrats, and they are really looking in places where Hillary Clinton was strong, believing they can make up some ground there."

Like Ohio in 2004, where Karl Rove and his Republican operatives spun a tail of a last minute voter surge from right-wing evangelical Christians including homophobic old order Amish in horse and buggies, the Pennsylvania narrative is already obvious. It includes the following elements: Hillary Clinton beat up on Obama in Pennsylvania, the Bradley effect of closet racist Democratic voters, and Obama’s comments about "bitter" people clinging to their guns and religion. All of these will be used to explain away Obama’s double-digit lead when, in the wee hours of the morning the Republican cybervote comes in.

It was between midnight and 2am during the 2004 election that the Ohio majority for John Kerry electronically became a winning margin for George W. Bush. The "miraculous" shift occurred after Ohio’s official vote count was outsourced to private company SmartTech’s servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The servers housed a virtual who’s who of Republican and anti-Kerry websites.

The Free Press has also learned that SmartTech technicians took over control at then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell’s office at approximately 9 p.m. on Election Day 2004.

Throughout the nation, the Democratic Party has been a no-show in the fight to rid the process of the machines that did so much to give George W. Bush his two illegitimate terms of office. The Democrats have refused repeated entreaties from the grassroots election protection movement to take meaningful action. Given the abject surrender of Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, this is not a good sign.

Nor is the syndrome limited to the Democrats. The arrogance of denial was recently trumpeted by the Nation Magazine’s Andrew Gumbel. His contempt for "underqualified" internet researchers who have "breathlessly" reported the GOP thefts of 2000 and 2004 reflects a widespread inability to grasp the enormity of what has been done to the American electoral process. Gumbel has refused to debate or appear on radio programs with co-author Bob Fitrakis, who holds a Ph.D. in political science and a J.D.

The grassroots election protection movement has made enormous strides in forcing this issue into the mainstream. But because of the GOP-sponsored Help America Vote Act, more Americans will vote this year on electronic machines than ever before.

That, and the stripping of the voter rolls, could make fleeting any apparent polling advantage Barack Obama may carry to November 4. He may yet win. But those who would see him enter the White House in January had best spend these last few days totally focused on the protection of voter registrations, on making paper ballots available wherever possible, and on finding ways to crack the secret fortress of electronic vote counting. In our next article, we will provide extensive documentation on GOP stripping of registration rolls.

Without neutralizing these twin towers of electronic disenfrancisement and vote theft, a McCain-Palin victory on November 4 is all but inevitable, no matter what the polls now seem to say.

–
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of four books on election protection, including HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 and AS GOES OHIO: ELECTION THEFT SINCE 2004, both available at http://freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

“Hearne was one of the most important Bush operatives that almost nobody in America has ever heard of. He applied his vote-suppressing trade from coast to coast, behind the scenes, in a well-funded systematic effort to undermine democracy and keep voters – Democratic voters – from exercising their legal franchise,” Brad Friedman, Editor of Bradblog, told the Free Press. Bradblog was the first to reveal Hearne’s masquerade as a voting rights advocate.

Hearne’s name recently surfaced in the scandal surrounding the White House’s firing of U.S. attorneys causing the mainstream media to begin scrutinizing his past political activity. The National Journal has pointed out that Hearne is a “common denominator” in the firing of Arkansas U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins and western Missouri U.S. Attorney Todd Graves. At the time of the firings, Cummins was investigating Republican Governor Matt Blunt’s administration, and Graves had refused to indict when partisan charges were brought against the Association of Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN) for a voter registration drive just prior to the 2006 election.