Sunday, July 31, 2016

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH AND JUDY SHOW:


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.



 If the last two weeks depressed you, then here's a piece to put our fighting spirit in gear! 

THIS WEEK IN NUCLEAR:  REMARKABLE NEW DEVELOPMENTS

 

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. 

And, in clear opposition, over 10,000 people marched last week for Clean Energy in Philly.

Sunday, July 24, 2016

CAUGHT BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE STATES


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 if  we 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:

GO HERE TO LOBBY SUPERDELEGATES FOR BERNIE!


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.
As of July 21st, 2016, the poll results are:

SAMPLE LETTER 

Here’s a sample letter, easily sent to every Clinton superdelegate by using http://www.lobbydelegates.com/delegates.php  It 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, ____________________

Sunday, July 17, 2016

THE HOMER SIMPSON PUBLIC SERVANT CONSUMER GUIDE (Excerpts)



(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).

THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY (EPA)

(We interrupt this message: Please go to

https://secure.foodandwaterwatch.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2639
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.

(We interrupt this message: Please go to

https://secure.foodandwaterwatch.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2639
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.

THE HOMER SIMPSON PUBLIC SERVANT CONSUMER GUIDE (Excerpts)



(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.

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

The State Lands Commission kills Diablo Environmental Review


Executive Summary

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.


Following the 2011 disaster in Japan, Diablo Canyon’s  Senior Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Inspector – Dr. Michael Peck, determined that the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility was not engineered to withstand the kind of ground motion that could occur – possibly triggering a nuclear meltdown.  CPUC e-mails that came out during discovery hearings exposed his findings and revealed how PG&E and the NRC’s bureaucrats got around his findings by transferring him to Tennessee.

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.

Readers may access the full report.

Sunday, July 3, 2016

VOTE FRAUD: Killing Democracy by a Thousand Cuts

How are our votes being stolen?

Let us count the ways…

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.’

[ See videos of the meeting at the end of this article, or here:
Don’t Let Them Steal Your Vote - Part 1 and Part 2 ]

What You Can Do:


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:

 

https://ballotsforbernie.org/vote-mail-irregularities/

Report your switched party status - as the primary mechanism used to discount votes.

Not a Pretty Picture


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.”

[ See also: Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies ]

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.
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