THE NEW JIM CROW: FLORIDA ELECTION DEBACLE 2000
Racism and Election Fraud Go High Tech
OR
The Year That Democracy Died

For the two or so years since the Supreme Court's incomprehensible decision that gave Bush the Oval Office, I've tried to keep an open mind. After all, I voted for Nader, and really kind of liked the fact that the Democrats received a well-deserved kick in the crotch for ignoring their left base. Don't get me wrong; I think that Bush is a clueles idiot, a puppet controlled by some very evil thugs, the worst president ever (as said by Helen Thomas), but the whole Florida affair was, I must admit, very confusing and not at all well covered by the US news media. I am still not entirely clear on how the whole thing happened or exactly why.

However, I am now entirely convinced of one thing about the 2000 election: George W. Bush knowingly and illegally stole it--because of that, he is a criminal of the highest order and should be removed from office immediately.

Why? My reading list. I just read the first chapter of Greg Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (you, too, can read that chapter, online, in pdf format; click here) which deals with the election. I have also recently read Eric Alterman's study of how the media covered the election in his book What Liberal Media, and Michael Moore's comments in Stupid White Men, too.

The long and the short of my newfound certainty of election rigging in Florida is like this. Forget the chads. Forget the recounts. Forget Nader. Forget overvotes and undervotes. Forget the Supreme Court. Forget absentee ballots. Forget military ballots. Forget Gore losing Tennessee. Forget it all (for now, at least).

Remember this: it is now (as far as I can tell) undisputed fact that tens of thousands of African-American voters in Florida who wanted to vote, and had every right to vote were flagrantly and knowingly denied their right to do so. Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, has even admitted that it happened in an email to Greg Palast (even though she refuses to take the blame). The private firm that purged the Florida voter rolls of "felons" also has admitted it (they won't take the blame either, but I suspect that they were just doing as they were told).

I had been hearing about this, black voters in Florida being wrongly branded as felons without voting rights, in 2000, for a while. Both Alterman and Moore piqued my curiosity about this issue, but didn't provide many details. Fortunately, my next purchase was the Palast book. Palast is a pretty interesting guy. Here is a passage from the "about the author" section of his book:

An internationally recognized expert on the control of corporate power, before picking up pen and camera Palast worked with labor unions and consumer groups in the United States, South America and Europe investigating corporate corruption. In America, among his more noted cases, he directed government investigations and prosecution of racketeering by nuclear plant builders and, for the Chugach natives of Alaska, probed charges of fraud by oil companies in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez.

In other words, Palast, an American from Los Angeles, doesn't come from the field of news, and approaches investigative journalism more like a combination of an academic researcher and a private eye--he seems to be free of most of the biases that are inherent in journalism as a discipline, free of the herd mentality. Unfortunately, this makes him unemployable at American newspapers, despite his well-deserved reputation as an expert. Palast works out of London; mainstream US politicians and reporters absolutely hate him. Gore could have used his help (Palast was reporting about the disenfranchisement even during the recounts, before the US Supreme Court intervened), but wouldn't touch Palast's reports with a ten foot pole. Too bad for Prince Albert; too bad for America. Too bad for the world.

Here's what happened.

In 1998, the Florida governor's office contracted out to a private firm (against Florida state law) the responsibility to find and verify the existence of felons who had lost their voting rights, but were still registered. This seemed to be a sweetheart deal: the contract went to the highest bidder, a company called ChoicePoint DBT, for millions of dollars more than the next highest bidder. DBT was then ordered by the governer's office to cast as wide of a net as possible in their search--for instance, a known convicted felon named, say, John J. Smith who is black, could get John Q. Smith who is also black named to the purge list, even though John Q. Smith has no criminal record and still has the right to vote. This wide-net directive resulted in tens of thousands of innocent black voters being named to this purge list of felons without voting rights. Even though the contract with DBT called for verification of the list in addition to compiling it, the governor's office ordered DBT to not verify the list.

Palast is dubious of the existence of conspiracy when the project began. However, he speculates that when Katharine Harris and the rest of the Jeb Bush gang in Florida saw the first, unverified purge list, and saw that the vast majority of these "felons" were black and probably Democrats, the temptation to meddle with the process became overwhelming--suddenly, these Republicans realized that they had the ability to strongly tip the Florida voter balance in their own direction if they simply used the first draft purge list. This is, of course, only speculation, but it is now documented fact that Republican state officials meddled with the purge process for whatever reasons. Even though it might have been some "accident" or "oversight," the faulty purge list resulted in the "election" of George W. Bush. It also resulted in a massive and racist miscarriage of justice.

George Bush, the thief in chief.

Don't take my word for it.

from Salon on December 4, 2000:

Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program - Salon.com's politics story of the year

If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a "scrub list" of 173,000 names targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list that included purported "felons" provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties.

Click here.

from the Observer on December 10, 2000:

A Blacklist Burning For Bush

Hey, Al, take a look at this. Every time I cut open another alligator, I find the bones of more Gore voters. This week, I was hacking my way through the Florida swampland known as the Office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris and found a couple thousand more names of voters electronically 'disappeared' from the vote rolls. About half of those named are African-Americans. They had the right to vote, but they never made it to the balloting booths.

Click here.

from the Nation February 5, 2001:

Florida's 'Disappeared Voters': Disfranchised by the GOP

In Latin America they might have called them votantes desaparecidos, "disappeared voters." On November 7 tens of thousands of eligible Florida voters were wrongly prevented from casting their ballots--some purged from the voter registries and others blocked from registering in the first instance. Nearly all were Democrats, nearly half of them African-American. The systematic program that disfranchised these legal voters, directed by the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was so quiet, subtle and intricate that if not for George W. Bush's 500-vote eyelash margin of victory, certified by Harris, the chance of the purge's discovery would have been vanishingly small.

Click here. (By the way, the three articles just linked are also printed, in full, in Palast's first chapter, which is linked above.)

Finally, here's some streaming BBC video of a Palast report on the overall debacle for those with short attention spans; it's in the style of, but better than, 60 Minutes.

So here's the situation. An absolutely unbelievable, but completely true criminal enterprise literally stole the 2000 US Presidential election in Florida, and therefore, the nation, for George W. Bush. Given his familial and professional relationships with the agents of subversion who engineered the theft, Bush was, in all probability, aware of their actions. That makes George W. Bush is a criminal. Under this criminal's leadership, the US has suffered greater pollution, greater corporate influence over government, greater lack of access to health care, greater unemployment, greater poverty, greater riches for the wealthy, greater influence of fundamentalist Christians over government, greater intolerance of dissident views and of other ethnicities, loss of civil rights, loss of international respect and trust, and loss of international sympathy for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (which Bush may have known about and been able to prevent). The US has invaded and occupied two countries. The US has killed hundreds of thousands of people. The US public is unaware of the massive deception and eagerly supports the "President's" actions. The world is afraid of America; America is afraid of the world. This is probably the worst crisis our nation has ever faced, our darkest hour.

America the surreal.

George W. Bush is not the president.

Repeat it loudly and continually to anyone and everyone who won't punch you in the face.

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