ter"> History is so important. Norman Mailer said that all writers must know history. Professors Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman certainly do. They write the history no one else does--of election corruption in their home state, Ohio, and throughout the country since 2004.
Most recently,
even more recently than the publication of their book this year, they have
revealed to the public the strong connection between the Romney family and Hart
InterCivic, the nation's second-largest voting machine manufacturer and
custodian that participates in the electoral process beyond delivering the
hugely defective product. H.I. operatives also help at the polls of their
clients all over the country, with all of their equipment.
Need I say more?
Since the
publication of his brand-new book Billionaires
and Ballot Bandits, investigative journalist and author Greg Palast has
revealed the blind-trust connection between the Romneys and the bailout of the
automobile industry during the great recession back in 2008. Though hardly in
need of assistance themselves, they profited from buying out another bankrupt
entity, Delphi Auto Parts, for pennies and then going public on the Dow and
raking in dollars, as much as 115 million of them. Now GM, along with its
colleagues, can't do without auto parts, which are essential to the manufacture
of cars. Strangled by gluttony and avarice, they paid the price demanded by
these religious people, straight out of their bailout funds and ours.
Palast, in his outstanding Foreword, lauds the erudition and importance of the authors' works and how we have all benefited from them inestimably, those enlightened enough to read their work anyway.
A massive
grassroots upheaval is needed, for six compelling reasons (in addition to the
new ones specified above), one that should have arisen far sooner, notes Palast
in his Foreword. The reasons are the massive billions freed to spend on political
campaigns thanks to Citizens United;
the Electoral College, which forces focus on the swing states--campaigning since
the party conventions has been confined to ten states; the disenfranchisement
in infinite ways of the downtrodden of all descriptions who would naturally
vote Democratic; the use of electronic voting machines as a particularly potent
disenfranchiser; and finally, the Progressives' alienation from the President,
only recently receding in the face of the hideous monster that threatens a
disastrous upheaval, beginning with negatives: bye-bye, Obamacare, Public
Television, most of Medicaid . . . the list goes on.
At least
Obama began positively by announcing his intention to close the prisons at
Guantanamo.
But then,
thank God, ways out of the quicksand are listed, six of them, as above: take
money out of politics; nonpartisan election administration; automatic
registration of all U.S. citizens upon reaching age eighteen; polls that are
located accessibly; an extended voting period, with "Election Day" lasting four
days that include a weekend; and hand-counted paper ballots as the only voting
vehicle, which means doing away with electronic voting, a huge conduit for
election corruption.
The ways
elections are stolen are described in depth in the next section, followed by an
invaluable section on the history of stolen elections dating back to the
controversy that put one stunning founding father into office who defeated
another, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, respectively.
Jim Crow
was born, more or less, when the southern states feared loss of power because
of the hugely larger population in the North; each of their slaves was
therefore counted as three-fifths of a person when it came to the vote they were
not allowed to cast until the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870. The
real Jim Crow era was ushered in soon after as a result of another crooked
election, decided by back-room bargains that removed Yankee troops from the
South, demolishing Reconstruction and the partial protection it had extended to
freed slaves who did not migrate north. This was the Tilden-Hayes contest that
Tilden actually won but Hayes subsequently sewed up.
Then there
were three other corrupted elections: those of John Quincy Adams, William
McKinley, and George W. Bush.
Third
parties, including Socialists and two waves of Progressives, have been influential between then and now, though a
three- or four-party system is still way off the radar. The authors wonder how
many votes these and other parties really won in presidential elections and how
many of these have been stolen. Will we ever know? Paper ballots back then were
perishable in an infinite number of ways; today I'm sure they can be preserved
at least as well as electronic data.
The
definitions of a Republican and a Democrat so deviate from the partisan
histories that both founders, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, would turn
over in their graves if they knew what had become of them. I therefore reject
nineteenth-century associations of them with their later incarnations. Once can
almost but not completely decide that if these founding figures were switched
around, the associations might be more appropriate.
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