Get Up, Stand Up!

What's the major difference between the Bush's stolen US 2004 election and the stolen election in the Ukraine? As anybody watching TV these days can see, it's the thousands of protestors clogging the streets and refusing to take NO for an answer.

In the USA today, the only people prepared to take such drastic action are Republicans, as could be seen by the mob scenes from the hotly contested 2000 elections.

So where are the protesting mobs of outraged Democrats when you need them? Has 1960's style street protest really being so passé?

Thom Hartmann examines the problem in his latest piece, How To Take Back A Stolen Election:

Ironically, the Democratic Party knows how to highlight election fraud and start national movements to bring down administrations that try to steal elections. A Party-affiliated group has helped do it four times in the past four years.

But not in Ohio, Florida, or anywhere else in the USA.

Instead, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Madeleine K. Albright, Chairman) has joined up with a similar organization affiliated with the Republican Party (the International Republican Institute - John McCain, Chairman), other NGOs, and US government agencies to support the use of exit polls and statistical analyses to challenge national elections in Ukraine, Serbia, Belarus, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

In three of those four nations they succeeded in not only mounting a national challenge, but in reversing the outcomes of elections.

The election reversals were accomplished by funding local groups - most made up of a core of activists and college students - who worked to topple regimes that had rigged their own re-elections.

As Ian Traynor - one of the finest investigative reporters working in the world today - notes in a 26 November 2004 article in The Guardian titled "US Campaign Behind the Turmoil in Kiev," [a must-read article, by the way: Gandhi] "the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes...

As generations of activists have taught us, we can't wait around for politicians to fix a corrupted political system. It's going to take - as the Ukrainians are now showing us - involved and active citizens to make this happen, and that requires an organizational framework to cut through the political and media fog.

And now is the time to begin.

One lady who is taking it to the streets is Bev Harris, whose group Black Box Voting yesterday filed a lawsuit against Palm Beach County, Florida for failure to provide public records. And, if that wasn't enough proactive effort:

Today, at the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections meeting in Orlando, we made a surprise visit to the podium during Teresa LaPore's send-off meeting to present her with a courtesy copy of the lawsuit we served on LaPore this morning.