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Rense.com
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Vanishing Act
By Chris Floyd
The Moscow Times
9-23-3
It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands
switching in a blur of buyouts and bogus fronts. It's a sinkhole, where
mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists,
CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers -- and presidential family
members -- lie down together in the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with
pork-funded, half-finished, secretly programmed computer systems installed
without basic security standards by politically partisan private firms, and
protected by law from public scrutiny. It's how the United States, the
"world's greatest democracy," casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush
will almost certainly be the next president of the United States -- no
matter what the people of the United States might want.
The American vote-count is controlled by three major
corporate players -- Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia -- with a fourth, Science
Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies --
all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid -- have been given
billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping
computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These
glitch-riddled systems -- many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves
no paper trail at all -- are almost laughably open to manipulation,
according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford,
Johns Hopkins and other universities.
The technology had a trial run in the 2002 midterm
elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic
governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called "amazing"
upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last
pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter
Mondale -- a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died days
before the vote -- was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing.
Convenient "glitches" in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for
the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother"
Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly "glitched" local election went
to court to have the computers examined -- but the case was thrown out by a
judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the "trade
secrets" of the private companies who make them.
Who's behind these private companies? It's hard to tell: The
corporate lines -- even the bloodlines -- of these "competitors" are so
intricately mixed. For example, at Diebold -- whose corporate chief, Wally
O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, has publicly committed himself to
"delivering" his home state's votes to Bush next year -- the election
division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at
"rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked in the vote-count business
by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council for National Policy, a
right-wing "steering group" stacked with Bushist faithful.
Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist
"Christian Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a theocratic
takeover of American democracy, placing the entire society under the
"dominion" of "Christ the King." This "dominion" includes the death penalty
for homosexuals, exclusion of citizenship for non-Christians, stoning of
sinners and -- we kid you not -- slavery, "one of the most beneficent of
Biblical laws."
Ahmanson also has major holdings in ES&S, whose former CEO
is Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office,
his own company counted the votes; needless to say, his initial victory was
reported as "an amazing upset." Hagel still has a million-dollar stake in
the parent company of ES&S. In Florida, Jeb Bush's first choice for a
running mate in his 1998 gubernatorial race was ES&S lobbyist Sandra
Mortham, who made a mint installing the machines that counted Jeb's votes.
Sequoia also has a colorful history, most recently in
Louisiana, where it was the center of a massive corruption case that sent
top state officials to jail for bribery, most of it funneled through
Mob-connected front firms. Sequoia executives were also indicted, but
escaped trial after giving immunized testimony against state officials. The
British-owned company's corporate parent is private equity firm Madison
Dearborn -- a partner of the Carlyle Group, where George Bush I makes
millions trolling the world for war pork, privatizations and sweetheart
deals with government insiders.
Meanwhile, the shadowy defense contractor SAIC has jumped
into the vote-counting game, both directly and through spinoffs by its top
brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney and
Carlyle honcho Frank Carlucci, and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history
of fraud charges and security lapses in its electronic systems hasn't
prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors
-- and will doubtless pose little obstacle to its entrance into election
engineering.
The mad rush to install unverifiable computer voting is
driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush last year. The chief
lobbying group pushing for the act was a consortium of arms dealers -- those
disinterested corporate citizens -- including Northop-Grumman and
Lockheed-Martin. The bill also mandates that all states adopt the
computerized "ineligible voter purge" system that Jeb used to eliminate
91,000 eligible black voters from the Florida rolls in 2000. The
Republican-run private company that accomplished this electoral miracle,
ChoicePoint, is bagging the lion's share of the new Bush-ordered purge
contracts.
The unelected Bush Regime now controls the government, the
military, the judiciary -- and the machinery of democracy itself. Absent
some unlikely great awakening by the co-opted dullards of the corporate
media, next November the last shreds of a genuine American republic will
disappear -- at the push of a button.
http://www.tmtmetropolis.ru/stories/2003/09/19/120.html
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