04 November, 2008

Counting Chickens, Voting Your Conscience, and Nukes

Journalist Greg Palast has a disturbing article this week up at TruthOut called "How McCain Could Win". It's all about voter suppression. Here are some lowlights:

***In Colorado: "Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll." Don't worry, though, Colorado's Election Reform Commission will hold hearings on this purge on 19 November.

***"In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted."

***"San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls" including Maez himself, who had been purged.

***Re New Voters: "In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations.

***Re New ID Laws: "Professor Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent of white voters in Indiana don't have the needed ID. And, for blacks, it's about double – 19 percent lack the ID required to vote."

***"A US Civil rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter's ballot will 'spoil' or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter's."

***"Another study shows that Hispanics' vote choices are six times as likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper ballots."



Also of interest was this week's column by Chris Hedges who favors Ralph Nader in today's election. He argues that Nader is right on the issues…

There is little disagreement among liberals and progressives about the Nader and Obama campaign issues. Nader would win among us in a landslide if this was based on issues. Sen. Barack Obama’s vote to renew the Patriot Act, his votes to continue to fund the Iraq war, his backing of the FISA Reform Act, his craven courting of the Israeli lobby, his support of the death penalty, his refusal to champion universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans, his call to increase troop levels and expand the war in Afghanistan, his failure to call for a reduction in the bloated and wasteful defense spending and his lobbying for the huge taxpayer swindle known as the bailout are repugnant to most of us on the left. Nader stands on the other side of all those issues.

…and in favor of voting one's conscience.

Those on the left who back Obama, although they disagree with much of what he promotes, believe they are choosing the practical over the moral. They see themselves as political realists. They fear John McCain and the Republicans. They believe Obama is better for the country. They are right. Obama is better. He is not John McCain. There will be under Obama marginal improvements for some Americans although the corporate state, as Obama knows, will remain our shadow government and the working class will continue to descend into poverty. Democratic administrations have, at least until Bill Clinton, been more receptive to social programs that provide benefits, better working conditions and higher wages. An Obama presidency, however, will make no difference to those in the Middle East.

I can’t join the practical. I spent two decades of my life witnessing the suffering of those on the receiving end of American power. I have stood over the rows of bodies, including women and children, butchered by Ronald Reagan’s Contra forces in Nicaragua. I have inspected the mutilated corpses dumped in pits outside San Salvador by the death squads. I have crouched in a concrete hovel as American-made F-16 fighter jets, piloted by Israelis, dropped 500- and 1,000-pound iron-fragmentation bombs on Gaza City.

I can’t join the practical because I do not see myself exclusively as an American. The narrow, provincial and national lines that divide cultures and races blurred and evaporated during the years I spent in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Balkans. I built friendships around a shared morality, not a common language, religion, history or tradition. I cannot support any candidate who does not call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to Israeli abuse of Palestinians. We have no moral or legal right to debate the terms of the occupation. And we will recover our sanity as a nation only when our troops have left Iraq and our president flies to Baghdad, kneels before a monument to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi war dead and asks for forgiveness.

We dismiss the suffering of others because it is not our suffering. There are between 600,000 and perhaps a million dead in Iraq. They died because we invaded and occupied their country. At least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of the occupation forces for every foreign soldier killed this year. The dead Afghans include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by an air assault in Azizabad in August and the 47 wedding guests butchered in July during a bombardment in Nangarhar. The Palestinians are forgotten. Obama and McCain, courting the Israeli lobby, do not mention them. The 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza live in a vast open-air prison. Supplies and food dribble through the Israeli blockade. Ninety-five percent of local industries have shut down. Unemployment is rampant. Childhood malnutrition has skyrocketed. A staggering 80 percent of families in Gaza are dependent on international food aid to survive.
(Emphasis mine.)

Finally, did anyone else watch last week's Frontline - The War Briefing? If not, I highly recommend doing so. (You can watch it online.) The thought of extremists getting their hands on Pakistan's nukes is chilling.

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