December/January
How
to Take Back a Stolen Election
Thom Hartmann
A
Personally Transformational Encounter of Left and Right
Tom Atlee
Polarization
Dynamics and A Passion for Inclusion
Tom Atlee
Strengthening
Society and Building Democracy Through Conversation
Vicki Robin
May
All Beings Be Reconciled
Phillip Moffitt
The
Great Divide
David La Chapelle
The
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
Thom Hartmann
From
Hurt to Heart
Eryn Kalish
A
Lesson in Consensus from Contentious Idaho
Rocky Barker
"You
Never Can Tell" • An Interview With Pete Seeger
David Kupfer
Broadcasting
Peace
Walter Cronkite
How
The Far Right Media Empire Manufactures Consent
Amy Goodman & Juan Gonzalez
Democracy
Fails: Corporations Win
Peter Phillips
On
Media and the Election
Robert W. McChesney
Helping
Our Political Evolution
Molly Young Brown
Participatory
Democracy and the Spiritual Community
Marilyn Taylor
How
to Live Healthy, Sane Lives in Crazy Times
Howard Woodwind Morningstar & Sue Mauer Morningstar
Jean-Claude Koven
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
Deborah
Mokma, Editor
"First
they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”
- Mahatma K Gandhi
“Start
by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are
doing the impossible.
- Saint Francis of Assisi
“Never
doubt that a thoughtful group of committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
- Margaret Mead
I have never been more aware of my Ukrainian ancestry, nor more aware of the
myriad of ways politics in the US has ignored the democratic process, than
during the tumultuous post-election period last November.
Following the November election in Ukraine Secretary of State Colin Powell stated: “We have been following developments very closely and are deeply disturbed by the extensive and credible reports of fraud in the election. ... We call for a full review of the conduct of the election and the tallying of election results.” The irony of this statement of course is that he could easily have been referring to the November 2 presidential elections in this country.
Post-election Ukraine contains a second irony. Ian Traynor explains in a November 26, 2004 article in The Guardian (“US Campaign Behind The Turmoil In Kiev,” www.guardian.co.uk): “The [opposition] campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes … the US government itself is estimated to have put $14 million into supporting groups challenging the recent Ukrainian election.”
William Rivers Pitt (truthout.org) observed: “The events of [last November] in the United States and the Ukraine are a study in electoral duality. In the Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest that nation’s questionable election, and on December 1, the Ukraine Parliament brought down the government in a no-confidence vote over the election. Here in America, over 30,000 reports of electoral irregularities ... have led to little more than silence from the mainstream media and the national political establishment.”
Karl Rove admits to intentionally keeping the administration’s “bad news” off the air (see blackboxvoting.org) based upon his belief that “... the medium that matters most by far is television ... over 80 percent of Americans claim to get most of their news from TV… a great many Americans consume political news in sporadic, sidelong fashion if at all ... if you can keep bad news off the front page and off TV news, most people will never even know it happened. There are only a handful of media organizations in charge of what Americans see on the national TV news, and they are always looking over their shoulders at each other. They’re not just pack animals; they’re an exceptionally small and manageable pack. Give them interesting things to take pictures of, toss them an emotionally charged sideshow like gay marriage occasionally, and they will show the public whatever you want them to see.”
Walter Cronkite (page 17), long considered “the most trusted man in America,” has this to say about today’s news broadcasts: “We are never going to be able to [adequately cover political contests] unless the traditional networks give us enough time to devote to information transmission to the people. Those half-hour evening news programs are vastly inadequate. After the commercials, the lead-ins, the lead-outs and all that, we’ve got something like 16 or 17 minutes at the most … We all wished for years for prime time in which to do news or documentaries. We finally got it … So what do we do with these magazine shows? Sex, crime, the oddball events of the world … What would happen if our networks would devote those prime time magazine hours that they do to instant documentaries? Suppose you have the headlines at 6:30 and you came up with 60 minutes Wednesday night for an hour and at that time you saw a documentary and a panel of experts and so forth that would explore the problem that we revealed at 6:30. We would advise this nation, we would educate this nation in a manner in which it has never been educated before. We would use television the way people dreamed that television would be used.”
There are, however, more and more people addressing the possibility of fraud in the 2004 election in the media, including Ian H. Solomon, associate dean of Yale Law School in an article in The Baltimore Sun (11/26/04) who wrote: “The legitimacy of our democratic process is an issue more important than Mr. Kerry’s future or the results of 2004. That legitimacy has been called into question repeatedly over the past few weeks, and doubts will linger as long as credible indications of error, negligence, disenfranchisement and fraud are not addressed … This should be a priority for Congress, with vigilant participation by independent news organizations. The complete process—from registration through vote tallying, including all equipment and procedures—must be thoroughly and publicly assessed … No reasonable argument can be offered against disclosure and accountability. We can afford whatever expense, inconvenience, distraction and possible embarrassment may be caused by an election audit and congressional investigation. What we cannot afford are unresolved doubts about the legitimacy of our democratic government.”
James K. Galbraith, who teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, observed in a Salon.com article (“Democracy Inaction,” Nov. 30, 2004): “If US officials who are complaining about election fraud in Ukraine applied the same standards in Ohio, then our own presidential election certainly was stolen … the secretary of state in charge of the elections process [in Ohio] was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in the state. He obstructed the vote count systematically … there was rampant abuse, with voting machines added in Republican precincts and taken away in Democratic ones ... The result was a crippling pileup at the polls; many thousands did not vote because they simply could not afford to wait. These are the established facts. And then there are allegations of irregularities in the count—how solid these are, one does not know. Taken together, are these enough to change the outcome? No one can say. But the same is true in Kiev. And there, allegations by the defeated opposition are taken in good faith, and are quite enough to satisfy international observers and the government of the United States. So where is the press? Why aren’t there more stories on Ohio? Why is there no national pressure for a prompt statewide recount? Why no continuing outcry? Why no demand—as our friends are making with strong American support in Ukraine—that the election results in Ohio be set aside and a new vote held? Why has our election, with all its thuggery, been forgotten? … Our political leaders … stay silent and move on. They are terrified of being mocked and bullied by the press.”
With exit polls by Zogby and CNN showing Ohio going for Kerry with 53% and 51% respectively, the long list of irregularities points to a seriously flawed election outcome. Professor Steven Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, when examining the exit polls and announced results in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, concluded that the odds against such an accidental discrepancy in all three states together was 250 million to one. Freeman explained: “As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”
Writer and radio show host Thom Hartmann (page 5) explains: “As generations of activists have taught us, we can’t wait around for politicians to fix a corrupted political system … as the Ukrainians are now showing us, it’s going to take involved and active citizens to make this happen … And now is the time to begin.”
After reading this there is a chance you may be feeling angry with certain politicians, or the mainstream media, because of the sorry state of affairs of our electoral process. Please take a deep breath and let go of that anger. That’s right—let go of it! Unless we turn this energy into compassionate positive action, we won’t be able to accomplish our goals for a more peaceful world. We have some wonderful articles in this issue which examine the power of conversation, consensus, reconciliation, and bridging the divide. Please consider the thoughts being shared with an open mind and see if you experience a shift in your perspective. As singer and activist Pete Seeger (page 14) says: “The world will be saved when people realize we all have to pitch in.” If that means demonstrating in the streets until we succeed, so be it. But let’s do it with love in our hearts and a positive frame of mind.
Remember. Together,
we can.
