Is Democracy Dead in Bush's USA?

Considering the huge number of anti-Bush websites that were set up in the past year or more, it is proving rather difficult to get some straight information on the GOP shenanigans that stole the elections, and what moves are afoot to counter them.

The Net seems to be groaning under the weight of millions of confused and angry bloggers and readers, searching for truth or agonising over their loss. Since election day, I have been struggling to even read my blog, let alone post here. Getting reliable news from other sites is proving equally frustrating.

I've reprinted a few critical articles below, in case you cannot access them elsewhere. There is also a list of "likely illegal acts" in this election at http://www.accuracy.org/new.htm - these include the fact that the Ohio Secretary of State was not only co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, but also tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. Here are a couple of typical quotes from activists:

"A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."

An attorney who monitored the election with the Election Protection Coalition, Fitrakis said today: "There were far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs. I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas. Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election -- like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County. Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry's."

Here too is an exerpt from the New York Times original report on Diebold's corrupt CEO, from November 9, 2003:

"In mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. 'I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,' wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio. That is hardly unusual for Mr. O'Dell. A longtime Republican, he is a member of President Bush's 'Rangers and Pioneers,' an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race. But it is not the only way that Mr. O'Dell is involved in the election process. Through Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary in McKinney, Tex., his company is among the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting machines. Judging from Federal Election Commission data, at least 8 million people will cast their ballots using Diebold machines next November. ... Some people find Mr. O'Dell's pairing of interests -- as voting-machine magnate and devoted Republican fund-raiser -- troubling."

So what now? Carolyn Baker, a professor of U.S. history, has some positive advice for where to go from here:

First, we must willing to face the reality that we do, in fact, live in an empire and that that empire is plummeting headlong into unrestrained fascism. This means the death of our relentless fantasies that we still live in a democracy or that the old paradigm based “electing the right candidate” can serve us. We have had three corrupt elections in America in the past four years. Continuing to believe that we will have a clean one in 2008 is tantamount to insisting that the earth is flat.

Secondly, we can join with millions—yes millions, of Americans who will not swallow the foul, fairytale version of what happened on September 11, 2001. Rather than obsessing over who might be the “right” candidate to “save” us, we can choose to work in a grassroots movement with victims’ families and other truth-demanding citizens for a totally transparent investigation of that watershed moment in time which the empire will continue to use to justify its devourment of other nations and its own citizens. I believe that a grassroots movement of 9-11 truth-tellers has the potential for total transformation of the political landscape of the United States, and I personally will settle for nothing less than that level of social and political renovation.