Random, day-to-day reflections of what it means to live as a member of the human race on a planet which has become as vulnerable as a human body.
Cecile Pineda's books are available from Independent Publishers Group.
DISSATISFACTION WITH POLITICS-AS-USUAL HAS REACHED CRITICAL MASS
IN THE UNITED STATES
Most of the 99%, disenfranchised Americans in all camps, have had it with
establishment politics and it’s high time. Unfortunately, either way, I predict
the consequences at the polls this November will be disastrous, disastrous for
the nation, and especially disastrous for a world at risk from climate collapse
and from nuclear war.
The establishment is quite happy to ignore the fact that
voting machines are owned by Republican interests, and that as privately owned
election machines, their codes are proprietary, and that they have the ability,
through the use of back doors, to strip and flip any “election” it may please a
“Democracy” such as this one to call.
It will be interesting to see what role they play in this
November’s selection. If the margin between the Punch and Judy they offer as
candidates is sufficiently narrow, the selection can be decided literally
with a coin flip. Be sure to vote! Your vote counts!
The establishment is still operating in the mindset that
Barack Obama, although raised by white women, was somehow a Black president. Had
Mr. Obama been Black, he would never have been elected, or had he accidentally
been elected, he would have had to be assassinated. In the same way it is
imagining that Clinton is a first-woman-president-in-the making. Appearances do
not make the man—or the woman for that matter. Culture does.
The Clinton candidacy will bring out every single
disaffected white male in the Untied States, because they perceive her as a
woman, and consciously—or otherwise—they recognize that their day is over.
Trump knows how to appeal to them.
Meantime, war, stolen primaries, GMO, oil trains,
pipelines, fracking, TPP. new nuclear plants, deportations, exoneration of police
lynching people of color will never go ho-hum unopposed again not by the left, and in some cases, notably TPP, not by the
right either.
For both the left and the
right, the politics of the
establishment are toast. Trump, no matter how dumb, seems to get it; the DNC camp does not.
We watched them dig their own grave this past week.
The next White House “resident” will move in sometime in
January and his name won’t be Hilary.
I’m making book. But, either way, Punch or Judy, we get the
government we deserve.
This past Friday, the UK's new Prime Minister's delayed going ahead with the $24 billion Hinkley nuclear debacle until this fall. New York will be deciding Monday on whether or not to give the state's ailing nuclear stations a $500-million-a-year bailout. The New York Times has been using its pro-nuclear bully pulpit to promote a $7.6 billion state subsidy for New York nuclear stations including Indian Point which had previously been targeted by Gov. Cuomo for closure. The Times has published two attack pieces on Solar Power, the latest of which suggested that solar was no longer financially viable in California. The piece went on to promote the Electric Industry's national campaign to roll back Net Metering. The New York regulator's decision on Monday is being hyped as a major media splash that will save nuclear power in the country! (petition here). The nuclear utilities are threatening to close up to five units if they don't get the subsidies.
In no place in the country has this battle had more impact than in California where the largest expansion of solar power in the country has been taking place. Net metering and the solar energy industry have come under growing attack since Jerry Brown's election. This last January, the electric industry failed to kill net metering at the CPUC but the solar industry submitted 130,000 signatures in its campaign to save it. Even so, the agency sided with electric companies efforts to phase in monthly connection fees for all Net Metering customers the year before, while the IOU's biggest ally, Commissioner Florio - who earlier voted to kill Net Metering - has taken on plans to make Metering fairer for the big three. It was the above New York Times piece that focussed on a California resident whose Net Metering plan was no longer financially lucrative, but failed to give details about the CPUC's rate restructuring plan that will benefit the state's biggest energy hogs at the expense of average energy users!
With the country's nuclear industry on the ropes, it is desperately hoping for new financial support from Trump who has promised to bring back the coal industry and ignore Climate Change issues. A court in Utah refused to agree with environmentalists opposing a proposed nuclear facility that could end up contaminating the Colorado River, allowing the project to go ahead, while new nuclear reactor projects in New Jersey, Georgia and by the TVA have been announced. At the same time, conservatives in Congress held hearings on how to streamline the NRC's licensing process in a desperate attempt to jump start certification for Small Modular Reactors (SMR), while a spike in lobbying has taken place by two utilities which want to use the nearly dead nuclear tax credit for new reactors, as well as allowing SMR's also to be included. At the same time the Dept. of Energy has been holding Potemkin Nuclear Waste listening sessions almost everywhere except in Texas and NM where the industry is pushing to build a Monitored Retrievable Spent Fuel site. Deadline for DOE comments are tonight (add your comments by clicking here).
The uranium mining industry is experiencing its lowest prices worldwide as demand has slowed with Japan's nuclear fleet still closed down due to public opposition. The EPA has been in the news for recently announcing horrible radiation standards for US water supplies. Republicans are saying that they will reorganize the EPA if they get the administrative reigns this year, while the agency, after 8 years of delay announced plans to restart cleaning up thousands of contaminated uranium mines across Dineh (Navajo) lands.
Meanwhile a new push to mine uranium around the Grand Canyon continues even with the global uranium glut continues to drive prices down. And then we have Hillary and Bill's family problem as Republicans launched a full-scale attack on twitter, claiming they let Russia take over 20% of America's uranium mining industry. This story will only get bigger even though a NY Times piece tamped the flames down a few years ago. If the right wing pushes too hard on this, it will likely come back to bite them since the Clinton's were actually part of George W. Bush's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) campaign to launch a global renaissance of nuclear power back in 2005. In the push to build nuclear stations worldwide, the GNEP proposal included a UN plan supported by Russia to make Kazakhstan the world's uranium banking headquarters Hillary's GNEP nuclear fingers were burned in 2010 when she was caught pushing Chile to build its first nuclear facility just weeks before the country suffered a 9.0 earthquake.
The independent global report on nuclear energy was also released in mid July. It clearly shows that the industry is struggling worldwide, with the start up of 52 of Japan's 54 nuclear facilities being blocked by the public, while Taiwan voted in a new government dedicated to make the country nuclear free by 2025. The massive nuclear expansion agendas in South Africa, and India are struggling while China has scaled its plans back from the installation ?commissioning? of over 150 reactors originally planned prior to the 2011 Fukushima triple meltdown. And on the positive side, China announced plans to build a $50 trillion grid globally designed for wind and solar energy.
Homer Simpson struck again this week: at the Republicrat
convention, (the one in Cleveland) while civilians were being allowed to carry
military-grade weapons in downtown Cleveland, such items as tennis balls, cans
or umbrellas were banned.
On the other hand Nathan Fisher writing for Truthdig had a much more complex analysis to offer, namely that true
structural change cannot come about by means of a Sanders program that insists
on working within the system. “There
is a reason this confusion exists, and the reason is that there is no viable or
functioning political force arguing explicitly for a socialist political
program. It is what the radical left is hoping to get out of the Sanders
campaign and the millions of people whom it has revealed to have an affinity
for a left-of-center platform. But the time is now, and we must value clarity.”
A Whiff of the ‘What If’
Political
sophisticates would do well to read Nathan Fisher’s entire article (of which
the above paragraph introduces the specific analysis he proposes). On the other
hand, political pragmatists (and I am one of them) believe that those younger
than 40 in this country have gotten a whiff of the green fields lying beyond
the crushing and suffocating weights of business as usual and endless war. The
Sanders campaign has gone beyond putting lipstick on a pig. It has opened the
gates of ‘what if’ speculation. What ifwe could begin to consider the Happiness Index of our own retrograde
country as far-advanced Bhutan seems able to do?
To that
end, I offer SOMETHING YOU CAN DO. AND DO RIGHT NOW:
Dear Friends of Bernie, It’s easy to send letters to
each and every superdelegate- it took me about 10 minutes using the above site.
First, compose your letter (see sample letter below). Go to the site, and
click on the first state, Alabama. Put in your information- you only have
to do it once. Double click on “select all,” then send. Use the
back button and go to the list for the next state. Very easy.
1) Hillary’s naming of Tim Kaine
as her running mate has antagonized Bernie and his supporters, probably beyond
repair. According to David Swanson,
“Tim Kaine has been consistently
ranked as one of the least progressive Democrats
in the U.S. Senate, a supporter of “right to work” (for less) law restricting
union organizing in Virginia, and he is a supporter of corporate trade
agreements including the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) and including
fast-tracking the TPP. An extremely loyal Democrat, he nonetheless criticized
Democrats in 2011 for proposing higher taxes on millionaires.”
2)On Friday WikiLeaks published
roughly 20,000 leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee
(DNC). They show that key figures on the Committee plotted to undermine
Bernie’s campaign and boost Hillary’s since early 2005. Despite this,
Bernie has 1,832 delegate votes earned in primary elections.
Hillary has 2,219. These numbers would surely been reversed if the DNC
had maintained its mandated stance of neutrality, if the primaries had been
honest and the media fair in reporting. Bernie is the people’s
choice, and should be the nominee.
3)The Koch brothers are now supporting Hillary.
They are one of the main forces behind climate change denial. Couple this
with the refusal of the DNC to include a fracking ban in the platform, and we
have a recipe for dooming life on the planet. There’s no way that
global warming can be stopped or even slowed with influences like this
controlling the next president.
4) The gruesome spectacle of the
Republican Convention indicates that Trump would be an unmitigated
disaster. Yet despite the blatant stupidity and nascent fascism in
Cleveland, the race is still too close to call. Trump is getting more
savvy, and will run a devastating campaign against Clinton.
Here’s a sample letter, easily
sent to every Clinton superdelegate by using http://www.lobbydelegates.com/delegates.phpIt
takes two clicks per state-about 10- 15 minutes. You can write your
own. If we bombard them this weekend, they just might listen.
Dear Fellow Democrat and Superdelegate for the State of
___________________:
When the roll is called at the Democratic Convention, please
keep in mind that given Hilary Clinton’s choice of Tim Kaine, pro-TPP,
pro-coal, anti-labor, and anti-progressive taxation as VP, given last week’s
Wikileaks revelation of secret DNC memos favoring a Clinton campaign as early
as 2005 and plotting to undermine Sanders, given the fraudulent primary vote
counts in such key states as California and New York, and given that the Koch
brothers are now throwing their support behind Clinton, Clinton’s ability to beat Trump is very much in question, as you
may remember from many previously conducted polls. I therefore urge you to vote
for the stronger electable candidate, namely,
Bernie Sanders.
Sincerely,
____________________
(In a move to corroborate their competence, today’s newsletter examines the recent competence of a number of public servants)
PROSPECTIVE FEMALE US “CANDIDATE” FOR RESIDENCY (PFUSCR)
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t like coups. And most governing bodies (GBs) don’t much like them either, because coups might do a lot of damage, not just to the GBs, but they might bring on collateral damage (CD). But there are some happy exceptions. Take Honduras, for example. We had to get in there, we didn’t have a choice. I just want to quote the PFUSCR: “Now I don’t like the way it looked. [And I don’t like] the way they did it…where they sent, you know, the military to, you know, take him out of his bed and get him out of the country in his pajamas.” She’s a real fashionista. She would have preferred a three-piece suit. But you don’t get everything you wish for, even as a PFUSCR. And for sure she knows how to dodge and weave, and she’s a stickler for correct procedure, and that’s what we need in a diplomat and a PFUSCR. Just listen to this: “If the United States (US) government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid…the support that we were providing…for a lot of very poor people. And that triggers (see how subtly she refers to crosshairs) a legal necessity. So our assessment was, we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people if we declare a coup and…immediately…stop all aid for the people, but we should slow walk and try to stop anything that the government could take advantage of, without calling it a coup.”
So that’s what a Prospective Female Candidate for the US Residency (PFUSCR)
recently went on the record saying, justifiably claiming that without a coup, the poor little Central County of Honduras (that’s CCH) wouldn’t be able to receive any more US AID, except you can’t call it a coup. It has to be something else, which is why they took him out in his pajamas and not a three-piece suit). Now AID to poor little countries like CCH is what the US always does best. We aid them. We aid them to take out people, people who cause trouble like Berta Cáceres and whose activities delay progress and things like dams. Because the U.S. upholds progress everywhere so we can expand our markets. Because the U.S. markets progress world wide. We want better market-share of better anti-personnel devices, better DIME bombs, better F16s, better AK47s, and better drones that go faster and are lots more effective making the world safe for even better Democracy (that’s capital D).
And without the coup in Honduras, the U.S. couldn’t send any more AID to poor little Honduras (CCH) except diplomacy doesn’t call it a coup. That’s why we have really qualified candidates running for residency because they’re hellbent on giving Democracy a chance.
THERESA MAY, THE UK’S NEW PRIME MINISTER (PM)
Barely sworn in, in fact before Theresa May’s first day was out, as the UK’s current prime minister(PM), Theresa May showed she is on top by ordering the closure of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). The facts speak for themselves. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was tasked with developing more energy and more climate change. Next she let bygones be bygones by naming her political rival, Andrea Leadsom, as Secretary for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Andrea is well qualified: as Minister for Energy at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), she kept asking if climate change was real. Which shows she’s a woman who’s deeply concerned. And isn’t all these women in high government office really proof that women have arrived at last—same as Barack proved Black folks are on the move. Anyway, Theresa May may have had other priorities in mind. She’s just launched an investigation about pedophilia in high places (that includes Parliament AND the Royals) which will go back to 1945. It stops there because all the high officials before then are already dead and anyway their victims are no longer kids. It’s just the guilty ones that are not yet dead).
Back to climate change, we all want to slow climate change as best we can. We leave our car motors idling, but just while we complete cell phone calls and send follow up text messages because we’re concerned not to drive while texting. We make sure to drive passenger pick up vans, shuttles, and large industrial scale trucks whose motors won’t start up again unless we allow them to idle while we 1) pick up passengers; 2) wait for departure until the schedule specifies; 3) load those great big trucks with scaffolding as we dismantle it from large construction sites, plywood masking, wheel barrows and other construction site materials. And we only drive to work because it saves time, and anyway the BART (named after my boy) station is two blocks away from our place of work (although we sometimes have to park six blocks away).
to sign on demanding the EPA stop promotiing radioactive water "protective" action guides.
Sign and share please.)
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) keeps protecting us from lead contamination in drinking water, especially in cities like Flint, Michigan, which is primarily Black with a relatively large proportion of children who suffer anyway from stunted growth due to malnutrition. It protected us from FEMA which wants to treat all those 600,000 stumps of trees it plans to cut in the East Bay Hills from too much Garlon and Glyphosate poisoning the run off, which is why FEMA is allowed to spray it only for ten years twice a year, and not eleven years or more.
It protects our water from excessive radiation, which is why recently it upped the amount of nuclear contamination it’s safe to drink, allowing for only a 1 in 23 people cancer rate. Now see, that’s real vigilance because the EPA noticed on May 7 that there was a toxic leak at Hanford, Washington, where workers complained of a metallic taste in the mouth, and other things like high blood pressure (maybe they were unduly scared) and headaches, nausea, and a burning sensation in the nose and throat.
So in June the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced brand new levels allowing for radioactive Iodine 131 at a concentration of 81,000 picocuries per liter, or 27,000 times more relaxed than the old level of only 3 picocuries, because it wants us all to relax. Even the workers at Hanford.
The beauty of this plan is it doesn’t throw taxpayers’ money around. No one has to go out in the field. No one needs to take samples of drinking water, or soil, or air, in Nebraska, or South Dakota or North Dakota, or Utah, or any other of the smaller regions, because the Washington-based Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the big (federal) picture (BFP), at heart and can do it just with numbers, crunching them between 9 AM and lunch; and after lunch till 3 PM, and after the happy hour, maybe until till 5.
to sign on demanding the EPA stop promotiing radioactive water "protective" action guides.
Sign and share please.)
THE NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION (NRC)
On July 15 the Washington Free Beacon announced that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gave a dummy corporation license to acquire enough materials to build a “dirty bomb.’ This was just a dirty tricks operation that the General Accounting Office (GAO) designed to trap the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
So first of all the General Accounting Office (GAO). The General Accounting Office (GAO) tried to pull a fast one by calling what was really a sting operation just an oversight report. The General Accounting Office (GAO) has been screaming jealous for years and years about the effectiveness of the FBI’s sting program setting up dummy terrorists. That’s probably why it decided to set up the Mother of all Stings. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) actually detected that two out of three of the General Accounting Office’s (GAO’s) fake corporations were dummies, giving it a score of 66.66666% success. It only gave one corporation the go-head for a ‘dirty bomb.’ That’s the kind of success that guarantees that the NRC will only have to deal with less than 33.33333% nuclear plant meltdowns because there are less than a hundred nuclear plants operating in the U.S. now, that’s until James Hanson and Bill McKibben bring a lot more of them on line twenty years from now and just in time to freeze global warming in its tracks.
FRACKING FOR URANIUM at the NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION (NRC)
Harry Anthony does a great job as the President of the Uranium Producers of America (UPA). He’s a terrific spokesman. Listen to this: “This is the most regulated industry in the world, but it’s never harmed anything….The industry has tried to work with the EPA to demonstrate that there is no risk to groundwater from uranium mining.” Now that’s a good spokesman. Especially for an industry which is tanking big time.
And guess what? Mr. Anthony even got the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the industry’s pocket. Because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) came out with a ruling that if an aquifer is dead anyway, it can be used for uranium fracking, especially if it’s not somebody’s drinking water, except maybe when it’s connected to another aquifer—except you can’t be sure of it anyway.
And Mr. Anthony has lots of uranium history behind him. Like the City of Grand Junction took advantage of the Climax Corporation’s three hundred thousand tons of uranium tailings to mix with constructions materials. Just think of it: a whole city, so economical you didn’t even have to install street lights because it glowed in the dark anyway. (The whole thing had to be replaced at a cost to tax payers of only over a billion dollars.)
And plus Rocky Flats. Under the Bush administration Rocky Flats got cleaned up cheap and dirty—well maybe not so dirty. It’s now a National Park. You can play night time golf over the surface of buried nuke waste, with golf balls that glow in the dark. (It only cost the taxpayers over a billion dollars, which is pretty cheap when you think about it.)
I, Homer Simpson have seen and approve this message.
(In a move to corroborate their competence, today’s newsletter examines the recent competence of a number of public servants)
PROSPECTIVE FEMALE US “CANDIDATE” FOR RESIDENCY (PFCUSR)
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t like coups. And most governing bodies (GBs) don’t much like them either, because coups might do a lot of damage, not just to the GBs, but they might bring on collateral damage (CD). But there are some happy exceptions. Take Honduras, for example. We had to get in there, we didn’t have a choice. I just want to quote the PFCUSR: “Now I don’t like the way it looked. [And I don’t like] the way they did it…where they sent, you know, the military to, you know, take him out of his bed and get him out of the country in his pajamas.” She’s a real fashionista. She would have preferred a three-piece suit. But you don’t get everything you wish for, even as a PFCUSR. And for sure she knows how to dodge and weave, and she’s a stickler for correct procedure, and that’s what we need in a diplomat and a PFCUSR. Just listen to this: “If the United States (US) government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid…the support that we were providing…for a lot of very poor people. And that triggers (see how subtly she refers to crosshairs) a legal necessity. So our assessment was, we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people if we declare a coup and…immediately…stop all aid for the people, but we should slow walk and try to stop anything that the government could take advantage of, without calling it a coup.”
So that’s what a Prospective Female Candidate for the US Residency (PFCUSR)
recently went on the record saying, justifiably claiming that without a coup, the poor little Central County of Honduras (that’s CCH) wouldn’t be able to receive any more US AID, except you can’t call it a coup. It has to be something else, which is why they took him out in his pajamas and not a three-piece suit). Now AID to poor little countries like CCH is what the US always does best. We aid them. We aid them to take out people, people who cause trouble like Berta Cáceres and whose activities delay progress and things like dams. Because the U.S. upholds progress everywhere so we can expand our markets. Because the U.S. markets progress world wide. We want better market-share of better anti-personnel devices, better DIME bombs, better F16s, better AK47s, and better drones that go faster and are lots more effective making the world safe for even better Democracy (that’s capital D).
And without the coup in Honduras, the U.S. couldn’t send any more AID to poor little Honduras (CCH) except diplomacy doesn’t call it a coup. That’s why we have really qualified candidates running for residency because they’re hellbent on giving Democracy a chance.
THERESA MAY, THE UK’S NEW PRIME MINISTER (PM)
Barely sworn in, in fact before Theresa May’s first day was out, as the UK’s current prime minister(PM), Theresa May showed she is on top by ordering the closure of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). The facts speak for themselves. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was tasked with developing more energy and more climate change. Next she let bygones be bygones by naming her political rival, Andrea Leadsom, as Secretary for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Andrea is well qualified: as Minister for Energy at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), she kept asking if climate change was real. Which shows she’s a woman who’s deeply concerned. And isn’t all these women in high government office really proof that women have arrived at last—same as Barack proved Black folks are on the move. Anyway, Theresa May may have had other priorities in mind., She’s just launched an investigation about pedophilia in high places (that includes Parliament AND the Royals) which will go back to 1945. It stops there because all the high officials before then are already dead and anyway their victims are no longer kids. It’s just the guilty ones that are not yet dead).
Back to climate change, we all want to slow climate change as best we can. We leave our car motors idling, but just while we complete cell phone calls and send follow up text messages because we’re concerned not to drive while texting. We make sure to drive passenger pick up vans, shuttles, and large industrial scale trucks whose motors won’t start up again unless we allow them to idle while we 1) pick up passengers; 2) wait for departure until the schedule specifies; 3) load those great big trucks with scaffolding as we dismantle it from large construction sites, plywood masking, wheel barrows and other construction site materials. And we only drive to work because it saves time, and anyway the BART (named after me) station is two blocks away from our place of work (although we sometimes have to park six blocks away).
THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY (EPA)
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) keeps protecting us from lead contamination in drinking water, especially in cities like Flint, Michigan, which is primarily Black with a relatively large proportion of children who suffer anyway from stunted growth due to malnutrition. It protected us from FEMA which wants to treat all those 600,000 stumps of trees it plans to cut in the East Bay Hills from too much Garlon and Glyphosate poisoning the run off, which is why FEMA is allowed to spray it only for ten years twice a year, and not eleven years or more.
It protects our water from excessive radiation, which is why recently it upped the amount of nuclear contamination it’s safe to drink, allowing for only a 1 in 23 people cancer rate. Now see, that’s real vigilance because the EPA noticed on May 7 that there was a toxic leak at Hanford, Washington, where workers complained of a metallic taste in the mouth, and other things like high blood pressure (maybe they were unduly scared) and headaches, nausea, and a burning sensation in the nose and throat.
So in June the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced brand new levels allowing for radioactive Iodine 131 at a concentration of 81,000 picocuries per liter, or 27,000 times more relaxed than the old level of only 3 picocuries, because it wants us all to relax. Even the workers at Hanford.
The beauty of this plan is it doesn’t throw taxpayers’ money around. No one has to go out in the field. No one needs to take samples of drinking water, or soil, or air, in Nebraska, or South Dakota or North Dakota, or Utah, or any other of the smaller regions, because the Washington-based Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the big (federal) picture (BFP), at heart and can do it just with numbers, crunching them between 9 AM and lunch; and after lunch till 3 PM, and after the happy hour, maybe until till 5.
THE NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION (NRC)
On July 15 the Washington Free Beacon announced that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gave a dummy corporation license to acquire enough materials to build a “dirty bomb.’ This was just a dirty tricks operation that the General Accounting Office (GAO) designed to trap the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
So first of all the General Accounting Office (GAO). The General Accounting Office (GAO) tried to pull a fast one by calling what was really a sting operation just an oversight report. The General Accounting Office (GAO) has been screaming jealous for years and years about the effectiveness of the FBI’s sting program setting up dummy terrorists. That’s probably why it decided to set up the Mother of all Stings. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) actually detected that two out of three of the General Accounting Office’s (GAO’s) fake corporations were dummies, giving it a score of 66.66666% success. It only gave one corporation the go-head for a ‘dirty bomb.’ That’s the kind of success that guarantees that the NRC will only have to deal with less than 33.33333% nuclear plant meltdowns because there are less than a hundred nuclear plants operating in the U.S. now, that’s until James Hanson and Bill McKibben bring a lot more of them on line twenty years from now and just in time to freeze global warming in its tracks.
FRACKING FOR URANIUM at the NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION (NRC)
Harry Anthony does a great job as the President of the Uranium Producers of America (UPA). He’s a terrific spokesman. Listen to this: “This is the most regulated industry in the world, but it’s never harmed anything….The industry has tried to work with the EPA to demonstrate that there is no risk to groundwater from uranium mining.” Now that’s a good spokesman. Especially for an industry which is tanking big time.
And guess what? Mr. Anthony even got the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the industry’s pocket. Because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) came out with a ruling that if an aquifer is dead anyway, it can be used for uranium fracking, especially if it’s not somebody’s drinking water, except maybe when it’s connected to another aquifer—except you can’t be sure of it anyway.
And Mr. Anthony has lots of uranium history behind him. Like the City of Grand Junction took advantage of the Climax Corporation’s three hundred thousand tons of uranium tailings to mix with constructions materials. Just think of it: a whole city, so economical you didn’t even have to install street lights because it glowed in the dark anyway. (The whole thing had to be replaced at a cost to tax payers of only over a billion dollars.)
And plus Rocky Flats. Under the Bush administration Rocky Flats got cleaned up cheap and dirty—well maybe not so dirty. It’s now a National Park. You can play night time golf over the surface of buried nuke waste, with golf balls that glow in the dark. (It only cost the taxpayers over a billions dollars, which is pretty cheap when you think about it.)
I, Homer Simpson have seen and approve this message.
The following material includes a
review of the recent decision by the California State Lands Commission (SLC)
that extended Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s (PG&E) lease of state
lands but denied a proposed Environmental Impact Report (EIR). The all-day
hearings which were held at two locations simultaneously had a large turnout by
both pro and con proponents. Following the decision, follow-up messages to Lt.
Governor Gavin Newsom led to a letter (see below) including his comments
challenging opponents over what he claimed were the maximum possible benefits
obtainable.
Below are a number of major sections addressing
his seven main claims and opposing responses to them, the extended policy
impacts of the PG&E proposal, and the known environmental impacts of Diablo
Canyon’s operation that have all been dismissed by state agencies, a decision
that should never have taken place.
The Commission avoided exercising its
duty of protecting the Public Trust when it failed to balance PG&E’s
interests with those of the rest of the state’s. It should have brought in testimony from the
solar industry and the California Energy Commission to evaluate the Diablo Canyon
deal cut the week before rather than using it as an excuse not to explore all
possible options. The SLC staff also used PG&E’s flawed seismic
commentary as well as the California State Water Control Boards’ political dismissal
of the plant’s aquatic damages as its reason for not carrying out an EIR.
The following report lays out the details of what happened at the CSL hearing and
what its impacts will be.
It was
pointed out that the SLC was using its own recently added regulations to
categorically deny the EIR rather than the far more stringent CEQA exemption codes that allowed the SLC to
go ahead with either a draft or full review based on the extraordinary events
that had happened or by a major earthquake prior to 2025. As pointed out
by the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility's attorney and former CEC
commissioner John Geesman, the staff's own analysis of studies on
Diablo's seismic dangers was outdated and clearly prepared with the help of
PG&E.
We were
treated to what the SLC Commissioners believed to be their duty of balancing
their duty to the Public Trust Doctrine with claims the 10 year extension would
protect the public from an abrupt San Onoffre styled closure that supposedly
led to large scale natural gas replacement (actually caused by a corrupt CPUC), crocodile
teas for workers, or the loss of property taxes that would affect the county's
top quality schools.
Proponents
calling for the EIR were told their efforts would result in increasing the
state’s use of Natural Gas. Nothing could have been further from the truth;
many speakers voiced concerns that the commission could have given PG&E a
shorter lease, expanding the shift to renewable energy, rather than waiting
until 2020 to begin.
Instead, it
was quite clear that SLC rules governing contact with the public were different
from those of the CPUC. Newsom acknowledged that he had been approached
by such pro-nuclear proponents as Stewart Brand, who had lobbied him
heavily.
A number of
activists sent letters to Lt. Governor Newsom, who responded by claiming that
he had “balanced state interests,” using "Public Trust" legal
requirements, at the same time claiming that activists had failed to prove that
concessions might have been agreed to by PG&E.
To Do an EIR or Not
to Do an EIR
The SLC’s
staff’s own discussion as to whether or not it should do an EIR is telling.
Rather than going ahead with any analysis, it sidestepped the issue by attempting
to draw on a fake Public Trust argument in order to make its decision denying the
study. It drew on recently added SLC regulations governing utility exemptions, exemptions that
were clearly subordinate to CEQA’s rules governing the utility exemption. During the
hearings, as a number of organizations pointed out, CEQA’s rules are clear: if there is any evidence of a
potential for unusual events, then an EIR is called for. And of course,
since Diablo was started prior
to CEQA’s passage, there has never been an EIR. Clearly there is something that PG&E is very frightened
to reveal.
Please see the License to Kill documentation for an historic
overview of how PG&E has done everything in its power to block any plans to
reverse the impacts of its Once-Through-Cooling (OTC) system. Back in 1975 when the
reactors were first activated, the largest single Pacific population of abalone numbering in the thousands was killed at Diablo Cove. Since
operation began in 1985 the facility dumps nearly 2.5 billion gallons of hot
water directly into the ocean with its OTC system because unlike most nuclear facilities, the plant
has no cooling towers. Additionally, it also
dumps the following toxins on a daily basis:
8500
pounds of arsenic
5800
pounds of cyanide
9300
pounds of lead
2100
pounds of zinc
150
pounds of mercury
Source: Protest
Diablo: Living And Dying Under The Shadow Of A Nuclear Power Plant, by
Judith Everett; from the 1981 California Central Coast Regional Water Board hearing
testimony by David Glock, graduate student at UCSB’s Marine Science’s Institute and using PG&E’s own records.
Following the
2003 report below, additional impacts to cormorants were reported at the
facility in 2006. Finally after growing evidence that California’s 23 OTC
systems were damaging California’s aquatic life, the state’s Water Quality
Control Board (WQCB) issued regulations requiring all units to add cooling systems
or be shut down. Exceptions were allowed for the state’s nuclear facilities, allowing waivers
that extended through Diablo’s entire first license period, ending in 2024 simply because
mitigation estimates ran from $4 to14 billion dollars. Additionally, pro-nuclear
activists were appointed to the statewide WQCB to make sure it was
protected.
Instead of
demanding staff from the WQCB to testify, documenting the full history, and
ongoing impacts to California's coastal waters, the SLC chose to stage a circus
performance of PG&E employees and SLO County elected officials, testifying on the
impacts from the loss of local property taxes povided by the company.
The SLC’s recent hearing process
was clearly used by PG&E and SLO County to create a fake Public Trust Doctrine
scenario for Diablo Canyon. As will be shown in the Policy Impacts
section, the state’s solar industry has already created 65,000 jobs and will
generate over ten times the amount of power the reactors produce in the next
five years!
The Land Commission’s staff could have used California’s
Environmental Quality Act rather than its own recently adopted rules to require
an EIR. As research shows, Lt. Governor Newsom spent years fighting for
PG&E during the time he sided with the company rather than the many San
Franciscans who were demanding that the city setup its own Community Choice
program back in 2008.
As clearly
shown, PG&E has manipulated the public trust to keep Diablo Canyon open and
well funded. It has broken state and federal laws and bent the will of
California politicians to get its way. It has long been able to use our money to
buy the best legal and technical support in the country as demonstrated by its
ongoing seismic safety (sic) strategy which went into high gear soon after
Fukushima.
In addition, former CEC commissioner
John Gleesman, wrote into the SLC’s record that its staff summary of the seismic
issues was outdated and flawed. Yet PG&E’s claimed that California was in good hands in case of a major quake. Additional testimony by two geologists as well as a presentation by
Dr. Dan Hirsch during the hearings were also ignored.
In the end, the commissioners reproached the audience for its ignorance of the relevant facts, and reminded it that they had executed their official duty by balancing the public trust.
By James Heddle and Mary Beth Brangan
With Permission
Electoral Proctology
Upside Down - International symbol of distress
As the fateful June 7 primary election day approached in 6 states,
including California, a stellar group of election protection luminaries
gathered on Memorial Day weekend in a private home in Santa Monica with
about 100 of their closest friends. Their purpose, as that great
American philosopher W.C. Fields once advised, was ‘to seize the bull by
the tail and stare the situation squarely in the face.’
An
ad hoc statewide group of passionate Bernie supporters calling itself
BALLOTS for BERNIE is observing the vote count throughout the state -- Wherever you are, you can too!
All
you need to do is post a message to Facebook, Twitter, e-mail lists, or
other social media. If you or anyone you know was forced to use a
provisional ballot, or had their party affiliaton changed without their
requesting it, please go to this website and use their contact form to
let them know:
Chaired by movie star and long-time political activist Mimi Kennedy, a
panel including Harvey Wasserman, Bob Fitrakis, Greg Palast, Bev Harris
and John Blakey compared notes on the myriad methods their
investigations have uncovered that are destroying the validity of U.S.
elections. Facing these facts is the first step in the daunting task of
restoring election integrity in America’s very broken electoral system.
In this year’s primary season alone we have seen:
• Massive disenfranchisement caused by arbitrarily changing voters’
assigned precincts and then giving incorrect information on the changes.
• Chaos caused in predominately minority districts by reducing the
number of precincts – and the number of machines per precinct – causing
long lines and hours-long waits which turned away many voters with jobs
or other time commitments.
• Arcane regulations which instructed poll workers to give unprecedented
numbers of voters ‘provisional ballots,’ which are rarely counted.
• For example, in California, voters who registered ‘NPP’ for No Party
Preference and were mailed a ballot, were not permitted to vote in the
Democratic primary unless they took both the ballot and its envelope to a
polling place and said the magic words, “I surrender this ballot and
request a cross-over ballot.” Without those exact words, poll workers
were instructed not to supply a ‘cross-over’ ballot AND not to inform
the voter of the rule.
• Media outlets prematurely calling elections before all ballots are counted – or, in some cases, even cast.
• As of this writing, 2.6 million ballots yet to be counted for the California primary
But it gets worse.
Strip & Flip
The theme of the Santa Monica panel was set by a hot-off-the-press book
just published by Fitrakis and Wasserman titled ‘The Strip & Flip
Selection of 2016: The Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft.’ [
Get it here: http://freepress.org/store.php
] This is the latest in a string of books the team has written in the
last decade. They have had a ringside seat to both observe – and also
fight against – the increasing corruption of the U.S. electoral system,
based, as they are in Columbus, Ohio, capitol of a key swing state. In
2012, Fitrakis’s threatened lawsuit in Ohio state court prevented the
planned electronic theft of the election and saved Obama’s election
victory.
[See “Swing State: How the Fix Was Nixed in Ohio 2012” ]
Election Theft, as American as Apple Pie
Intentional disenfranchisement of potential voters in order to favor
selected demographic sectors is simple in concept, if complex in means.
It has been a part of the American electoral landscape from the git-go.
Eliminating legitimate voters from the voter rolls by various tactics –
that’s the ‘strip’ part. Skewing the ballot count in order to produce
desired outcome percentages – that’s the ‘flip’ part – also achieved by
multiple mechanisms, as we shall see.
“Not every conspiracy is a theory.”
The ad slogan for the current thriller ‘Money Monsters’ actually gets it
right. Though poo-pooed as ‘conspiracy theory’ by pundits and vote
fraud denialists across the political spectrum, Bob & Harvey’s work –
in combination with the work of many other investigator/activists
including co-panel members Bev Harris, Greg Palast,, Mimi Kennedy and
John Blakey – has incontrovertibly revealed the plethora of means by
which America’s electoral system has now been stripped of the last
vestiges of whatever trustworthiness it may have ever actually
possessed.
A short run down follows – to be expanded upon below – of issues discussed by the panel.
But, keep in mind that, for brevity, the list does not include
additional key related issues, such as: unlimited campaign spending by
anonymous persons and non-voting corporate entities and their surrogates
– even from foreign states or agents; mainstream media’s biased
reporting; manipulations by party officials; ‘super delegate’ and
‘contested convention’ schemes; the counter-democracy Electoral College;
or the ‘gerrymandering-on-steroids’ REDMAP redistricting process
carried out by Republicans following the 2010 election, which left them
in control of the House of Representatives and many key state
legislatures until at least 2020, when the next census-based
re-districting is scheduled. The latter major ploy is well documented in
David Daley’s recent book “Rat F**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret
Plan to Steal America’s Democracy.”)
Here’s the short list from the Santa Monica panel presentations:
• Massive electronic purging of legitimate voters from voter rolls across the country
• Massive vote suppression and disenfranchisement by myriad means on a national scale
• Virtually decisive control of voter rolls without detection; vote
counting and reporting by privately owned, secret, electronic devices
and computer programs specifically designed to steal elections through
cyber chicanery.
The Five Jim Crows
It all started with the constitution, Wasserman explained, a document
drafted in secret, behind closed doors by a tiny elite of propertied
white men, and rammed through to ratification by the states through
electoral manipulation. It denied voting rights to women and to males
without property, but contained the “3/5ths clause” that gave slave
owners congressional representation for their slaves despite the fact
that the slaves themselves couldn’t vote.
The so-called Three-Fifths Compromise is in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned
among the several States which may be included within this Union,
according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by
adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to
Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three
fifths of all other Persons.
The effect, according to Wikipedia, “was to give the southern states a
third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if
slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free persons had
been counted equally, allowing the slaveholder interests to largely
dominate the government of the United States until 1861.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise
It was also a divide-and-conquer strategy to make sure black and
white laborers would never again unite in revolting as they did in
Virginia in 1675 in what’s called Bacon’s Rebellion.
Fitrakis and Wasserman call that ‘the First Jim Crow.’
After the Civil War and emancipation, they explain, Supreme Court
rulings, KuKluxKlan terror, black lynchings, literacy tests and other
apartheid strategies established the ‘Second Jim Crow,’
that “again guaranteed that blacks in the South (and parts of the
North) would not be allowed to vote, and that they would be carefully
divided from whites by caste as well as class.”
The Third Jim Crow was/is the ‘War on Drugs’
initiated by Richard Nixon to combat the liberalization of the southern
Democratic Party, the anti-war movement and the rise of the Black Power
movement. As Nixon administration official John Erlichman recently
explained to Harper’s interviewer Dan Blum, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that,
had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what
I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the
war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with
marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily,
we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid
their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night
on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of
course we did.”
Young, left-leaning Latinos were also caught up in the Drug War dragnet. Now, 45 years later, 41 million (mostly people of color) have
been jailed for pot and other controlled substances, making private
corporate prisons a growth industry, and giving the U.S. the highest
prison population in the world. Though having no significant impact on
drug use, the Drug War has disenfranchised millions of potential voters,
and continues to do so today. Michelle Alexander’s recent book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness shows how one system of race-based disenfranchisement has been replaced by another.
The Fourth Jim Crow, explain the authors, was born
of America’s push to establish what they call “a race-based global
empire” with a long series of foreign interventions – also continuing
today – which “involved the white-ruled US interfering with the
political systems of non-white nations.”
The impact of these interventions on our own political system, say
Wasserman and Fitrakis, has been catastrophic. “They’ve established the
US as a corporate-ruled race-based empire, fueling the growth of a
military whose intrinsic power overshadows our entire electoral
process…and set the stage for…the Fifth Jim Crow – the electronic flipping of our elections.”
Engineering Vote Fraud Abroad Comes Home to Roost
Manipulation of election outcomes in other countries has been developed
into a high art by such US agencies as the CIA, USAID and other
so-called ‘democracy promotion’ projects fielded abroad by both the
Republican and Democratic parties.
Note the authors, “Overseas, the CIA began to apply advanced
electronics to the art and science of election theft. By the 1970’s, in
front of the Church Committee, the Agency admitted to already having
manipulated countless Third World elections to protect America’s
corporate and ‘national security’ interests.” They trace the subsequent
development of electronic voting technology techniques, corporations and
institutions up to the present day, when up to 80% of US votes in the
coming presidential election will be electronically mediated. In line
with the adage that ‘what goes around, comes around,’ American expertise
in foreign nations’ electronic vote rigging has now come home to
compromise the integrity and validity of our own system, big time.
The New Jim Crow – “Interstate Crosscheck”
Panel member investigative journalist Greg Palast
has been researching and reporting on this process for going on two
decades for such outlets abroad as the BBC and the Guardian news paper.
Still, like the proverbial ‘prophet without honor in his own country,’
Palast states with deep frustration that he still has a hell of a time
getting American so-called ‘mainstream’ media to pay any attention to
his explosive exposes.
Now reporting for Rolling Stone, he is also using crowd funding to produce a forth-coming documentary titled, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits
In his presentation in Santa Monica Palast debunked claims by Donald
Trump and others that ‘millions of people’ are committing ‘voter fraud’
by ‘voting more than once.’ Describing what he calls ‘the next, or Sixth
Jim Crow,’ he reported that 29 state election officials across the
country have announced the creation of what they call ‘The Interstate
Crosscheck.’ Touted as a defense against mythical individual ‘voter
fraud’ the system purports to identify people who are voting more than
once, sometimes in multiple states, and purge them from polling lists.
In actuality, in violation of the Voting Rights Act, says Palast, the
program uses census data to identify African American voters – tagged
‘BLA’ for black– with similar common names and fraudulently remove them
from voter lists.
In the history of the South, when slaves were finally freed, they
were often registered by their masters’ surnames. As a result, to this
day, many black persons carry the same or similar names, thus
facilitating the “Interstate Crosscheck” scam.
Based on his findings, Palast says, “We expect 1 million voters –
almost all of them voters of color – to lose their right to vote in 29
Republican-controlled states before the November election.”
But, he is quick to point out, it isn’t just Republicans who
regularly mess with elections. As questionable outcomes in this primary
suggest, “the Democrats are dirty,” Palast says, pointing out that
Democrats invented Jim Crow, which Nixon just adopted for his so-called
‘southern strategy.’
Palast admits to being tired of being a ‘reporter in exile,’ and
hopes that, now that he is reporting for Rolling Stone, he can finally
come home and report his investigative findings to his own countrymen
“who need to know this stuff!”
“Fraction Magic” – A Digital Thumb on the Scale: Fractionalization & Decimalization of Votes
Harking back to the infamous “3/5ths clause” described above, what if
you were hired to write a vote-counting program that could assign
various arbitrary decimal or fractional values to each and all of the
votes counted and come up with desired percentages for every candidate
and contest?
To use a simple-minded butcher’s scale analogy: What if your program
assigned a vote for Hillary the arbitrary ‘weight’ of 2 pounds, and
assigned a Bernie vote just a weight of 1 pound?
Then, in a given race, Bernie got 200 votes and Hillary got 150 votes.
If you just added up the total votes for each candidate, you would call the election for Bernie with a 50-vote lead.
But, if your private, proprietary, secret counting program totaled
their votes by the artificial ‘weights’ it arbitrarily assigned to them,
you would announce Hillary the winner with a 300 to 200-vote lead.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the intentionally programed ‘glitch’
that BlackBoxVoting.org founder Bev Harris and her colleague, IT expert
Bennie Smith have discovered in a significant number of America’s vote
counting systems. It is achieved via ‘fractionalization’ or
‘decimalization.’
They explain that it works like this: “Instead of “1” the vote is
allowed to be 1/2, or 1+7/8, or any other value that is not a whole
number.”
That allows ‘weighting’ of selected electoral contests. “Weighting a
race removes the principle of ‘one person-one vote’ to allow some votes
to be counted as less than one or more than one. Regardless of what the
real votes are, candidates can receive a set percentage of votes.
Results can be controlled. For example, Candidate A can be assigned 44%
of the votes, Candidate B 51%, and Candidate C the rest.”
On her excellent webite BlackBoxVoting.org, Harris and Smith report,
…the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which
counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The
results of this study demonstrate that a fractional vote feature is
embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet
radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote
percentages to redistribute votes. This tampering is not visible to
election observers, even if they are standing in the room and watching
the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be
detected by auditing or canvass procedures, and can be applied across
large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds.
BlackBoxVoting.org
“GEMS vote-counting systems are and have been operated
under five trade names: Global Election Systems, Diebold Election
Systems, Premier Election Systems, Dominion Voting Systems, and Election
Systems & Software, in addition to a number of private regional
subcontractors. At the time of this writing, this system is used
statewide in Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Mississippi, New Hampshire,
Utah and Vermont, and for counties in Arizona, California, Colorado,
Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia,
Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. It is also used in Canada.”
Read more: http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-1/
Adjusted Exit Polls
Around the world, so-called exit polls – which ask a sampling of exiting
voters how they voted – are viewed as the Gold Standard for checking
the accuracy of the ballot count. In most countries, if the ballot count
and the exit poll numbers don’t match, there is either a recount or the
election is declared ‘not free and fair.’
Not so in America. Here, as Jonathan Simon documents in his book Code
Red: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century, the exit
poll numbers are instead adjusted to match the official vote count.
In the US, the exit pollster of record has been Edison/Mitofsky working for a consortium
of news organizations that comprise the National Election Pool (NEP):
ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and the Associated Press. As Wasserman relates,
when election researcher and statistician Dr. Steve Freeman called the
late Warren Mitofsky personally to request the raw data from the 2004
exit polls, the response was “Go f**k yourself.”
Maybe that’s why respected international election observer Former
President Jimmy Carter can say the USA “is not a functioning democracy.”
Maybe that’s why, as Fitrakis and Wasserman point out:
In March 2015, the Harvard Electoral Integrity Project
reported that over fourteen hundred international election experts
gathered data the year before and pronounced the United States was 45th
in election integrity among the world’s long-standing democracies. The
Project reported that on a 100-point scale, the U.S. received an
integrity rating of 69.3% – one notch ahead of the narco-drug state
Columbia….
What this means in practice is revealed in a recent study of three
decades of data by liberal mainstream political scientists Martin Gilens
of Princeton, and Benjamin Page of Northwestern. Their analysis
confirmed that the U.S. political system has become “an oligarchy” – as
Carter himself has said – where wealthy elites and their corporations
“rule,” regardless of which party is in Congress and the White House.
“The central point that emerges from our research,” Gilens and Page
wrote, “is that economic elites and organized groups representing
business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S.
government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens
have little or no independent influence.”
As Gilens explained in an interview, “ordinary citizens have
virtually no influence over what their government does in the United
States.”
Citizen Exit Polls
Edison Research was scheduled to do exit polling for the NEP media
consortium in the California primary. But when Ohio election protection
attorney Cliff Arnebeck gave notice that he intended to sue for the raw
data, the California exit poll was canceled.
Into the breach jumped California activist/funder Lori Grace and her
Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity
(www.trustvote.org), engaging professional pollsters to sample selected
districts in Northern and Southern California. The results will be
forthcoming at TrustVote.org
Already the site reports:
In other eleven states besides California, there has been
noted a significant difference between the Edison Research exit polls
and the electronic vote totals presented on the morning after the
primaries. These totals do not include anything from California. These
differences show votes appear to be shifted from Bernie Sanders to
Hillary Clinton. The chances of this kind of shift happening are
considered to be statistically impossible between Tuesday night and
Wednesday morning in these eleven states….
…In addition, some people may have concerns that [private election
system or voting machine] companies like Scytl/SOE and ES&S which
managed the votes in Kentucky, New York and Arizona, have directors who
are also on the boards of other companies involved in wire-tapping, the
defense industry and military interrogations.
A System Designed for Cheating
Corroborating the findings of the other Santa Monica presenters with his
own recent experience, John Blakey of Audit Arizona reported that, in
this very primary, in Maricopa County, domain of infamous Sherrif Joe
Arpaio, 150,000 voters appear to have been ‘suppressed.’ Possibly that’s
because 85% of Arizona voters use vote-by-mail ballots, which,
extensive evidence shows, rarely get counted.
Blakey is suing the State of Arizona for access to records. “We have the
right language for it now,” Blakey says, thanks to the work of the
other panel members. “It’s not ‘voter fraud,’ it’s vote fraud. It is a
system designed for cheating.”
STD – Software Transmitted Disease
Well-known actor Mimi Kennedy is a fierce, long-term election protection
activist in private life. In this election she received poll worker
training that has taken her into the heart of California’s election
system. She says her friend Bev Harris’ ‘fraction magic’ findings show
how deeply what she calls “STD, Software Transmitted Disease” has
infected our electoral system. She explains, “There are seven thousand
small voting jurisdictions all over America. State law controls
elections. Seven thousand jurisdictions within and among those states
can have some say in process, procedure, choice of private contractors,
common servicer software and hardware. Outside IT ‘experts’ are hired
who may or may not be honest or bright. That means that fraud capacity
is there. People ask me ‘Who are the ‘them’ that may be stealing our
votes?’ I tell them, ‘someone in any of those jurisdictions who can.’”
The Ohio Plan, ‘How to Nix the Fix’
Wasserman and Fitrakis admit that, “as we approach the 2016 election, the prospects for a truly democratic outcome are grim.”
However, lest we despair in the face of all these discouraging
revelations, they insist that the fixes in our badly compromised
electoral system CAN be nixed.
“The only cure,” they conclude, “is a bottom-up revolution in human
consciousness and action.” They hope their work “will help inform and
motivate an energized grassroots uprising” based on what they call The
Ohio Plan.
The Ohio Plan:
1. Universal, automatic, same-day voter registration.
2. A four-day national voting holiday.
3. Votes counted by students & elders, paid the minimum wage.
4. Universal use of hand-counted paper ballots.
5. A universal automatic recount.
May it be so.
============
Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle co-direct EON, The Ecological Options
Network. Since 2004, they have produced many video reports in
cooperation with FreePress.org and the Columbus Institute for
Contemporary Journalism which can be viewed on the EON’s YouTube channel
Election Protection & Deep Democracy playlist They are currently at work on a new documentary SHUTDOWN: The California-Fukushima Connection.
===============
If you like EON’s work, you can support it, whatever your budget level, here.
Most of the 99%, disenfranchised Americans in all camps, have had it with
establishment politics and it’s high time. Unfortunately, either way, I predict
the consequences at the polls this November will be disastrous, disastrous for
the nation, and especially disastrous for a world at risk from climate collapse
and from nuclear war. 
