Witness

Bush won by 3.5 million popular votes?

Bush won the election with more than 270 electoral votes due to his win in Ohio?

Maybe. Maybe not.

You can call me a sore loser, but I think that Kerry was wrong to concede so quickly, that Bush and/or his supporters most likely committed electoral fraud in many places around the country, and that we should, for the sake of our democracy and our futures, MAKE SURE that Bush really did win this election – without cheating.

There is an absolute avalanche of reports of election fraud, but most of it isn’t making it to the mainstream media, which means that such reports are readily dismissed. MSNBC, however, has covered some of the problems in Ohio and I invite you to check out this report:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6368819/#041109a

Here are just a couple of nuggets from the report that you might want to consider….

“In 29 precincts [of Cuyahoga County, Ohio], the County’s Website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters. I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.” In “Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.”

Many, but not all reports of election fraud intersect much too closely with electronic voting systems – built almost exclusively by corporations whose leaders have publicly and financially aligned themselves with the Bush Administration.

Every single electronic voting system available today is a “black box.” In the name of security and vote “protection", manufacturers like Diebold and ES&S don’t let anyone examine, test, verify the software and hardware they use. We are supposed to trust them to do things right.

Would you buy a lottery ticket if the winning numbers were picked from a “black box” that made it impossible to tell if the numbers were chosen randomly? No way! You want to see those balls tumbling around in and falling into place – very hard to rig. Why would we accept less from our voting equipment?

I think that black box voting is a recipe for disaster. The only way to go with electronic voting is to use completely open and transparent systems that rely on sophisticated encryption technology to make sure you can vote anonymously. I was very pleased to discover that a group called the Open Voting Consortium at http://openvotingconsortium.org is working to implement precisely such a system. I encourage you to visit the website and check them out.

Steven

This election has been such a drag (vicious attacks, widespread reports of vote fraud, massive amounts of money spent on campaign advertising while people go without health care and food), that I thought I would share with you some good news I read about today:

There are indications that many of the people who say they will vote for George Bush misunderstand his positions on a variety of issues!

The Program on International Policy Attitudes, a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, conducts surveys of Americans on a regular basis. PIPA just published a survey which includes the following results:

Eighty-seven percent of Bush supporters think he favors putting labor
and environmental standards into international trade agreements.

Eighty percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in
the treaty banning land mines.

Seventy-six percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in the treaty banning nuclear weapons testing.

Sixty-two percent believe Bush would participate in the International Criminal Court.

Sixty-one percent believe Bush wants to participate in the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Fifty-three percent do not believe Bush is building a missile defense system, also known as “Star Wars.”

The only two Bush stands that the majority of his supporters got right were
on increasing defense spending and who should write the new Iraqi constitution.

I find this to be very heartening news. Maybe there is more unity among Americans than I have been thinking. Maybe the millions of Americans who insist on voting for Bush would actually NOT vote for him if they really understood his views (this would be easier if he and Cheney stopped lying about the basic facts every chance they got, or if the media called them on it - yes, fine, do the same with Kerry and Democrats, please!).

Dennis Byrne is a syndicated Wise Man, otherwise known as pundit or columnist. This man really blows me away. He speaks with the usual arrogance of the species variant known as Older White Male with a Soapbox, but he is more remarkable than many in his ability to assert as fact his opinions, with nothing to back them up.

Here’s my favorite quote from his more recent column:

“But can anyone truly argue that our health-care system systematically denies tens of millions of Americans health care? I think not.”

He wrote a piece on global warming a few weeks ago (sorry, I cannot find it online), and another on health care on October 18 that I offer after my note, that compelled me to thank him for his wisdom (letter below). I urge you to read his columns and consider doing the same. This man needs all the encouragement he can get. Just think, a few more compliments like this one might force him over the edge into 100% delusional fantasies of grandeur. He will then write a column revealing himself as Jesus Christ returned to the Earth, and then perhaps the newspapers will drop his a*s from their editorial pages.

SF

LETTER TO BYRNE

Dear Mr. Byrne,

Your column today left me once again in awe of your deep and wide knowledge of so many complex topics.

Recently you wrote about global warming and clearly understood better and knew more about this issue than the thousands of trained scientists around the world who study global warming on a full-time basis. How do you DO that?

Today, you show that tens of millions of uninsured Americans do actually have access to health care. Which is a big relief to me, because a dear friend of mine is rather ill, but currently all but uninsurable. She was complaining that it was very hard to get, and afford, the medicines and doctor visits she needs. Clearly, this is not the case after all.

Kudos to you, Mr. Byrne! Keep up the good work!

Steven

BYRNE COLUMN IN CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Playing politics with our health

Dennis Byrne. Dennis Byrne is a Chicago-area writer and public affairs consultant
Published October 18, 2004

Health insurance isn’t the issue in the presidential campaign. Nor is health care. Health is.

Debate as much as we wish over opposing visions of health-care insurance, it really is only a means to the ultimate goal of good health. To say that 40 million Americans are without health insurance is not to say that 40 million Americans are without health care. The candidates–both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry–could help clarify this point by stopping the use of terms like “health care,” “health” and “health insurance” interchangeably.

So, while we debate health insurance interminably, the fact is America’s health is the best in the world. We tend to live longer and are in better health than almost anyone in the world. Our health is getting better because of improved access to services (despite what the popular wisdom says) and improved medical procedures and technology.

It’s necessary to mention these facts because, judging by some of the campaign debate over health insurance, you might figure that millions of Americans are dying in the streets. They aren’t. Some are getting a lower standard of health care, and that ought to be fixed. But can anyone truly argue that our health-care system systematically denies tens of millions of Americans health care? I think not.

Keeping this in mind, it seems to me that a critical, but not the only, reason for escalating health-care costs are the demands made on the system. Waiting rooms are filled with people expecting cures, hospitals are buying every costly diagnostic tool imaginable, and physicians are prescribing every procedure and medication under the sun. Because we want it all. That’s not necessarily bad. We just have to understand the implications.

As demand increases, so does the price of health care. Our health-care costs are far more than $1 trillion a year . Our per capita health-care spending far outstrips other nations. And as those costs rise, so does the cost of health insurance, sometimes putting it out of reach of individuals and employers.

Obviously, other factors drive up costs. One of them, Bush correctly says, is “defensive medicine,” health-care providers ordering extra tests and procedures to protect themselves from charges of medical neglect. High malpractice insurance rates also add to costs, driving some physicians out of business. Unquestionably, legal reform is in order.

We might even reduce costs by cutting back on the expensive research and development required to develop new medicines, procedures and technologies. We could do that by taking the profit motive out of that research, and handing those responsibilities and costs directly over to the government. (Please, let’s not.)

More fundamentally, Bush stated the problem best: Health-care costs are soaring because “third-party providers” pay for most of those costs. We (I’m as guilty as anyone) agree to every procedure ever suggested because someone else pays, and I don’t want to take any chances with my health. For all the other members of my health-insurance group who pay my expenses with their higher insurance premiums, thank you.

Bush is right that true health-care reform requires that responsibility for making health-care decisions be returned to individuals. Responsibility here means more than you get to decide. It also means that you’re more responsible for paying. Health insurance should return to being insurance, as it once was, protecting us against catastrophic health problems. Just as you don’t buy car insurance to pay for gasoline and oil changes–all necessary for your car’s well being–health-insurance costs have soared to unreasonable heights because someone has decided that it should cover “routine maintenance.”

That someone probably figured that the rest of us are too stupid to go in for routine checkups and engage in “preventative health care” unless we don’t have to fully pay for it. That someone also is inclined to argue that the only cure for this self-neglect is for government to take charge of everyone’s health.

But by returning health insurance to what it was meant to be, it will be priced at a level more people can afford. And more of those among the 40 million who want health insurance coverage (not all do) will be able to get it. Without more taxes, more layers of government, more indecipherable plans and more empty campaign promises.

———-

E-mail: dbyrne1942@earthlink.net

I recently received this note from my good friend, Assaf, an Israeli whose judgement, intelligence and eloquence I respect greatly. I haven’t yet followed his advice to buy the book “How Israel Lost,” but I plan to very soon and I encourage you to do the same!

Hi all,

For two years here I’ve been trying from time to time to convey
Israeli/Palestinian reality to Americans, with partial success. Many times I
encountered surprise or misunderstanding, because what I said contradicted
existing misconceptions. This is because, to put it mildly: the typical
American discourse about Israel is more fiction than reality. I thought to
myself: one should write a whole book, just to bring reality in.

It turns out someone just did. It is Richard Ben Cramer, who won a Pulitzer
prize for his Israel and Middle East reporting in the late ’70’s and early
’80’s. Now he returned to the land, and was so dismayed by what he found
that he named his book “How Israel Lost". The name is perhaps an overkill
(forgive the pun) and makes the book less attractive to some.

Forget the name. Go to the nearest library or bookstore and get it. The
thing I liked most about it was the unromantic approach and the off-the-cuff
language. That’s the way people think, act, write and talk in
Israel/Palestine. The typical American sugar-coated texts seem to remove the
essence of what’s going on. Cramer’s definitely a “leftist” in the sense
that he thinks Israel’s out of line with the Occupation - no excuses
accepted - but you won’t find any romantic admiration of Israel’s peace
movement (or of the Palestinian cause) in his book. In fact, there’s not a
single Israeli peace activist there (as far as I can remember). And not
because he wants to portray Israelis as warlike: Cramer is simply interested
in the mainstream, a place where the peace movement does not exist anymore.
As he aptly describes.

The book is divided into 4 parts, to “answer” 4 questions like the 4
questions of Passover eve. Parts 1 and 3 look at Israel, part 2 at
Palestine, and part 4 wraps them up together. The first 3 parts are mostly
based on individual stories. If by the end of part 1 you think Cramer is
just another “self-hating anti-Israeli", just hold your breath till part 2,
where he lashes out just as harshly at the Palestinian leadership. In
between he shows quite a bit of compassion and understanding to the people
of both nations. He brings people, events and reports which are well-known
(even iconic) to Israelis and Palestinians, but rarely make it past the
American filters.

Most of his analysis of Israel is right-on. He clearly has an insider’s
knowledge of the culture. Regarding Palestinians, I don’t know enough to
judge and seems like he too (as he admits) has less knowledge of them. Yet,
the overall picture of “current status” in the land is by far the most
reliable and accurate I’ve seen from an American, and in my view his
analysis places the ball squarely in… American and international hands.

Which is another reason why you should go and read it. And if you like it,
tell your friends. If enough people read this book, it might yet make a
difference.

Thanks, take care, Assaf

PS: the biggest inaccuracies in the book are related to the wall/fence, but
these seem to be mostly because at the time of the book’s closing (late
2003), there was still a lot of uncertainty about what’s going on. In fact,
by now the fence/wall story has gone way worse than Cramer describes. The
reasons for mild optimism he quotes at the end of the book have all but
evaporated, while IDF Air commander, General Dan Halutz (who ’stars’ in part
1) has been promoted to deputy chief of staff.

PS as in “police state". I am already certain that we are living in the “postscript” of the US empire – strange, but just as we or many Americans are all becoming aware of our empire (or acknowledging it openly), it is beginning its long, deadly decline.

Anyway, what got me thinking about police states? Cat Stevens.

Definition of “police state” from www.mirriamwebster.com

“A political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.”

Chicago Tribune, September 24, 2004

“U.S. authorities said earlier this week that they had received information from multiple sources indicating that Islam [formerly Cat Stevens, recently denied entry into the U.S.] may have associations with potential terrorists.”

When my wife, Veva, read this sentence out loud to me over coffee the morning of the 24th, chills ran up and down my spine. The words reverberated in my skull:

RECEIVED INFORMATION

MULTIPLE SOURCES

INDICATING

MAY HAVE

ASSOCIATIONS

POTENTIAL TERRORISTS

I was born in 1958. I was raised in a fairly typical middle class American Jewish family. This means that I was made uncomfortably and unavoidably familiar with the Holocaust and the nasty police state of Germany in the 1930s that became the nightmare of the Third Reich.

I have noticed several consequences of this upbringing…

* I have a strong, visceral dislike for large crowds, such as stadiums full of chanting football fans. I believe this reaction comes from the ways these spectacles resonate in my brain against the stark black-and-white footage of Germans loudly pledging “Heil Hitler” in waves of uniforms and hard, glistening eyes.

* I became an internationalist. What do I mean by “internationalist"? Perhaps that I am not tribal, that I don’t really know what it means to “love” my country, that I greatly prefer the free movement of people to the free movement of capital? See, I figure there are two basic responses a Jew can have to the Holocaust.

1. “Never again!” will I let a Jew be harmed or killed. We have suffered enough, we have been victims long enough.

OR

2. “Never again!” will I let what happened to the Jews (and homosexuals and Gypsies and …. ) happen to anyone else. What the Nazis did is so horrible that it should, it MUST, change the future of humanity for the better. How could anyone let any kind of genocide happen again after experiencing Hitler?+

The former interpretation leads, I believe, to a distorted perspective that presents Jewish life as more valuable, special, important than others (of course, this can never be openly acknowledged or admitted). It reinforces the sense of tribalism, of “our people” sticking together against everyone else. Combine this perspective with lots of power, and those special victims end up committing (or condoning) highly immoral acts of their own (for example, Ariel Sharon, the Israel Defense Forces in the Occupied Territories, Alan Dershowitz, etc.).

The latter interpretation, I believe, compels a Jew (and anyone else who attempts to wrestle with the Holocaust) to see himself or herself as part of a worldwide community of equals, of equally-precious human beings. That is the path that I have chosen; I do not feel myself part of the Jewish tribe, certainly not a Jewish state. I don’t really know what that is supposed to mean. I believe that if we are to have nations, they must be nations of their citizens, all their citizens.

* Finally (remember? This is about what growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust did to me), I am a bit sensitive to and aware of how a government in a democractic state can become a vicious instrument of tyranny and destruction - very quickly.

During the 1980s, I exercised my First Amendment rights (free speech) vigorously and loudly, protesting Ronald Reagan’s terrible policies in Central America that led directly to the deaths of over 100,000 people. In response to my and others’ actions (through a group called the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), the FBI launched a 50-state wide illegal “International Terrorist Investigation” against us.

The investigation was uncovered; the Director of the FBI apologized before Congress for the illegal campaign. We in Chicago brought a successful lawsuit against the FBI. I have copies of SOME of the pages from my files. So I know that the FBI engaged in photographic surveillance; they dug through my garbage; they infiltrated our non-violent, law-abiding group; they contacted and tried to intimidate supporters of our group, and much, much more.

Those were the good old days, before Osama Bin Laden handed fanatics like John Ashcroft and George W Bush a blank check to rampage through the civil rights of Americans.

Now, Cat Stevens is thrown out of our country because he “may have” “associations” with “potential terrorists.”

Gee, how is that potential determined? Who are the sources? What does “association” mean?

In September 2004, we are still able to ask these questions; and we SHOULD, we must. If we don’t challenge the steady eroding of our most basic rights, more and more of them will be taken away.

It will be a gradual process, applied mostly and initially to people who are not like us. Who are not citizens or are not middle class or do not speak English very well or are not Caucasian or do not have health insurance or don’t have a job or have views that are different from ours or….always somehow different from us, allowing us to believe that the Men in Black will never come for us, that we never did anything wrong, that THOSE people are somehow guilty of something. They must be, otherwise how could….

So back round we come to that most basic of questions: how do you define “us"? Who are your people? Who will you fight to protect? WHAT will you fight to protect?

Do you pledge allegiance to the flag or to the Constitution? Is your United States defined by the words of the President or those in the Bill of Rights?

I’ve made my decision. I will not pledge allegiance to a flag and certainly not to a President who tramples my rights and those of so many around the world. I pledge allegiance to the IDEALS that have made America a special place, so full of potential, so tragically unrealized.

Jews around the world are heading to their synagogues on one of the holiest days of the year (Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement). I’m not visiting a house of worship this year, but I pledge to atone for my sin of not working vigorously enough to ensure that the U.S. does not degenerate into a terribly dangerous fascist state under the “leadership” of Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft-Rumsfeld.

PS - I have a strong emotional attachment to Cat Stevens’ music. When Veva was pregnant with Eli (now 1 week shy of 18 years of age and in college - sigh…), I was learning to play guitar. And just about every night I would practice playing and singing one of my favorite songs, Moonshadow by Cat Stevens. Eli was born and Eli was a baby, so he would get upset and cry. We discovered that all I had to do was sing Moonshadow to my baby and he would calm down. Ah, such sweet days….

On September 23rd, 2004, I will be 46 years of age. Soon I will be fifty. I am middle aged. People tell me I don’t look my age (mostly due, I think, to a shaved head) and that I am “skinny” - still, I can see the bulge growing around my midsection and I don’t like it. In fact, you might say that I am a little obsessively concerned about not becoming overweight.

Problem is, I like to eat. I don’t like feeling full and I don’t like having to brush my teeth and floss more often, but I sure like the taste of salty (favorite: pistachio nuts), sweet (favorite: cherry pie), bitter (favorite: brussell sprouts), sour (favorite: fresh limeade) foods. Mmmmm.

I also have this problem of being compulsively addicted to doing things. It is really hard for me to sit still. I can watch movies and read books pretty well, but then I feel a strong need to eat something at the same time, as if to justify the “down time.” Pretty weird, huh?

I have been dwelling lately on the transience of food-derived pleasure. You chew on stuff. It tastes good. It turns into tiny bits of mushed up food. It goes down your throat to be broken down further and digested. Once it leaves your mouth, the fun of eating is over, right? So of course that means I need to eat more to enjoy that feeling once again. Yet no matter how many times I repeat the cycle (and I tend to go in salty-sweet cycles when I have decided to enter an extended snacking period), at some point I swallow my last bit, and it is all a thing of the past. I am just left with a bloated feeling.

I imagine that most people experience eating as I do. (What else is a human being able to imagine, when you come right down to it?)

So with these thoughts I have come up with a new idea for a diet:

Eat half the amount of food in twice the usual time.

Of course, diets like this only make sense when you are consuming more calories than necessary. I realize that for many, many (hundreds of millions of) people, this is not exactly a pressing issue. Not being hungry rates a bit higher on the priority list of concerns.

Yet this imbalance in the world – that I have so much, and others have so little – is another impetus for me to eat less, eat what I need, eat when I am hungry (not bored or feeling down about things) and eat more slowly.

Now it is September 9. I have started putting my HALF-TWICE diet into place. I am concentrating on eating more slowly and appreciating each mouthful…but I have not yet reduced my portions (well, maybe a little bit).

Next step: come up with a marketing program and lots of gimmicks so I can sell HALF-TWICE to the millions of Americans who can benefit from this new diet craze.

How about a fork that comes with a timer? The fork is half the normal size (maybe just 2 tines). The timer is started when I put a forkful of food in my mouth. If I try to put another load in my mouth while the timer is still going, then I get a small electric shock.

If you would like to invest in HALF-TWICE, Inc., the owner of the new diet that is sweeping the nation, please contact investor@half-twice.com.

Have a nice day!

Remake of classic to get into the psyche of Kong

By Ray Lilley
Associated Press
Published September 7, 2004

“A lot of thought has gone into exploring what would happen if there were a relationship between an old, brutalized gorilla and a young woman.”

Have you ever read the Onion? Check it out at http://onion.com. It is a satirical newspaper and is hilarious much more often than I would expect - 100% satire 100% of the time is a tough challenge. But perhaps the best thing about the Onion is that it makes you wonder about some of the other “news” you read.

Could THAT really be an Onion article? Surely, it can’t be REAL? I ran into one of those today (Sept 7, 2004) in the Chicago Tribune, courtesy of Associated Press. Full text and URL follows.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Peter Jackson first tried to film “King Kong” at 13, using a cardboard model of the Empire State Building, a bedsheet painted with a New York backdrop and his Super 8 camera.

Now 42 and with three Academy Awards to his credit, the director of the celebrated “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is ready to shoot a star-studded, multimillion-dollar remake. The Universal Pictures movie is due for release in December 2005.

Among the major changes Jackson promises from the 1933 original–which was remade the first time in 1976–will be greater character development, particularly for Kong.

“He’s a very old gorilla and he’s never felt a single bit of empathy for another living creature,” Jackson said.

So a lot of thought has gone into exploring what would happen if there were a relationship between an old, brutalized gorilla and a young woman.

“You introduce this other person into his life, which initially he thinks he’s going to kill, and then he slowly moves away from that and it comes full circle,” he said. “That’s what we’re exploring, and it’s really fun to go into that psychological depth with it.”

Naomi Watts, who plays damsel in distress Ann Darrow, stood on the deck of the film’s tramp steamer last week but declined to offer a preview of the bloodcurdling screams her part will require.

“I’m saving my voice,” said Watts, who will reprise the role made famous by Fay Wray, who died Aug. 8 at age 96.

“Those are big shoes to fill,” Watts told reporters, adding Wray “did a wonderful job” in a role the late actress often said had typecast her.

“It is an iconic movie and an iconic role. Hopefully, people won’t suddenly see me as only this role,” said Watts, who earned a best actress Oscar nomination for her role as a grief-stricken mother in 2003’s gritty drama “21 Grams.”

Adrien Brody, Oscar winner for “The Pianist,” plays the movie’s romantic hero Jack Driscoll, and comedy actor Jack Black is raconteur-filmmaker Carl Denham.

Brody said his character blends both sensitivity and heroism, “and oftentimes an actor is not presented with a role of that caliber. It’s usually one or the other.”

For Black, “It is a fun role I can tap into.”

And for Jackson, it’s “reliving a childhood dream.”

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0409070179sep07,1,2454670.story

Maybe I am stupid when it comes to economics. Economics 101 was, after all, the only course I took in college that I didn’t get an A in (sorry, I know that sounds boastful – and it sports a dangling participle – but it’s true. The course seemed like mumbo-jumbo to me, certainly no science at work there).

OK, check out these quotes from today’s Chicago Tribune:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/la-fi-gas31aug31,1,4679440.story?coll=chi-business-hed

“Oil prices soared this year because world supplies were tight, demand was rising, especially in the U.S., China and India, and traders feared that production might be seriously disrupted by tensions in several parts of the world, notably Iraq. Those fears became known as the “risk premium” built into prices, which according to some analysts have accounted for $10 to $15 per barrel. Beginning last week, supply concerns began to abate, said Rick Mueller, senior oil analyst at Energy Security Analysis Inc. in Wakefield, Mass.”

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0408310322aug31,1,1116090.story?coll=chi-business-hed

“Oil markets have been extremely volatile this summer because traders fret there is inadequate supply globally in the event of a prolonged output disruption in Iraq, Russia or Venezuela. But with the exception of sporadic dropoffs in Iraqi oil exports due to attacks on industry infrastructure, none of these fears has materialized. Oil-price speculation by institutional investors, including hedge funds, magnified this summer’s surge in prices, as well as the latest retreat, traders said.”

Enough. I may be completely wrong or completely naive or completely stupid about such “news,” but this is my interpretation of this stuff:

“Traders” (probably mostly young to middle aged Caucasian males who live high tech, intense lives built around acquisition of expensive gadgets and consumption of designer drugs) make subjective, proactive “calls” about where they see the “market” heading. They then bid up the price of crude oil (who is getting this money? The producers aka OPEC? I thought they fixed the price for a barrel of oil coming out of their pumps.)

IMMEDIATELY we see an incredible impact at the gas pump as this market demand (not actually based on anything going on in the real world of oil production or oil demand). Ever wonder about that? Supply and demand, supply and demand, hmmmm….traders in a market anticipate supply tightening, which means that demand will go up, which means that they can GET AWAY WITH paying more (bidding up the price of) their particular commodity now, because they can look forward to higher prices soon. And before the price increase actually hits the gasoline producers and distributors (ie, they are still paying the same for their products), OUR price goes up – and it stays up long after the price of crude starts to slide. Remarkable system. Remarkable philosophy at work here.

“Traders” (I think that “gambler” or “speculator” would be a more accurate term) make enormous sums of money – and are INCENTED to make enormous sums of money – manipulating the price of oil reserves. Remarkable system. Remarkable philosophy at work here.

I am not opposed to markets. I am, however, generally opposed to economic systems that trump and dominate political systems. The oil “market” should not be allowed to devastate entire segments of our economy (think about the impact on the airlines, trucking, taxi cab drivers), at the whim of “traders” who sit around in front of their terminals, recovering from the previous night binges (sure, not all of them, but according to many, many reports from the 90s, an awful lot of these people leading surreal lives).

You’d think “we” would have learned something from the days of Enron. Oh, that’s right. We did learn something. We learned that Arnold Schwarzenegger controls the fifth largest economy of the world.

So do I have this all wrong? Do I fundamentally misunderstand what is going on? Or am I just another one of the billions of patsies, being mocked and taken advantage of on a daily basis by those incredibly brilliant “traders"?

Friends,
I am sending this information to both my tech list and my non-tech list, because I think it has special significance for software developers, but is critically important for anyone concerned about the future of democracy in the United States (and the outcome of the November 2004 election).
So those of you who are developers: as you read this article, consider the incredible and destructive impact one dishonest programmer could have when it comes to voting machines….

Regards, Steven

***

How They Could Steal the Election This Time
by Ronnie Dugger

Ronnie Dugger wrote the definitive warning essay about the dangers of computerized vote-counting in The New Yorker of November 7, 1988. Research support was provided by The Nation Institute. Dugger wishes to acknowledge the special assistance of Frances Mendenhall, Pokey Anderson, Peter Neumann, Rebecca Mercuri, Roxanne Jekot and David Jefferson, and his debt to hundreds of other reporters whose work cannot be properly credited here.
On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.
The result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary, has written, “Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses.” Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March, “I don’t think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted.” Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that “a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election,” Kerry says his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to “challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes” [see Greg Palast, “Vanishing Votes,” May 17].
The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire.
About a third of the votes, 36 million, will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless, direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote directly on a touch-screen. Unlike receipted transactions at the neighborhood ATM, however, you get no paper record of your vote. Since, as a government expert says, “the ballot is embedded in the voting equipment,” there is no voter-marked paper ballot to be counted or recounted. Voting on the DRE, you never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official “can’t watch the bits inside,” says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world authority on computer-based risks.
The four major election corporations count votes with voting-system source codes. These are kept strictly secret by contract with the local jurisdictions and states using the machines. That secrecy makes it next to impossible for a candidate to examine the source code used to tabulate his or her own contest. In computer jargon a “trapdoor” is an opening in the code through which the program can be corrupted. David Stutsman, an Indiana lawyer whose suits in the 1980s exposed a trapdoor that was being used by the nation’s largest election company at that time, puts it well: “The secrecy of the ballot has been turned into the secrecy of the vote count.”
According to Dr. David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford, all elections conducted on DREs “are open to question.” Challenging those who belittle the danger of fraud, Dill says that with trillions of dollars at stake in the battle for control of Congress and the presidency, potential attackers who might seek to fix elections include “hackers, candidates, zealots, foreign governments and criminal organizations,” and “local officials can’t stop it.”
Last fall during a public talk on “The Voting Machine War” for advanced computer-science students at Stanford, Dill asked, “Why am I always being asked to prove these systems aren’t secure? The burden of proof ought to be on the vendor. You ask about the hardware. ‘Secret.’ The software? ‘Secret.’ What’s the cryptography? ‘Can’t tell you because that’ll compromise the secrecy of the machines.’… Federal testing procedures? ‘Secret’! Results of the tests? ‘Secret’! Basically we are required to have blind faith.” ….