You can bet they will give it their best try.
Good morning!
Since Robert,RT was kind enough to send me his list of writes, and post one of them here yesterday, and since Dallas raised the question, this write seemed like the most natural one to follow.
Will the GOP steal America’s 2012 election?
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
September 6, 2012
The Republican Party could steal the 2012 US Presidential election with relative ease.
Six basic factors make this year’s theft a possibility:
1. The power of corporate money, now vastly enhanced by the US Supreme Court’s Citizens’ United decisions;
2. The Electoral College, which narrows the number of votes needed to be moved to swing a presidential election;
3. The systematic disenfranchisement of—according to the Brennan Center—ten million or more citizens, most of whom would otherwise be likely to vote Democratic. More than a million voters have also been purged from the rolls in Ohio, almost 20% of the total vote count in 2008;
4. The accelerating use of electronic voting machines, which make election theft a relatively simple task for those who control them, including their owners and operators, who are predominantly Republican;
5. The GOP control of nine of the governorships in the dozen swing states that will decide the outcome of the 2012 campaign; and,
6. The likelihood that the core of the activist “election protection” community that turned out in droves to monitor the vote for Barack Obama in 2008 has not been energized by his presidency and is thus unlikely to work for him again in 2012.
Winning a fair and reliable electoral system can be achieved only with a massive grassroots upheaval.
The power of money is now enshrined by the infamous Citizens United decision. In at least 90% of our Congressional races and at least 80% of our US Senate races, the candidate who spends the most money wins.
From the presidency to the local level, our elections—and thus control of our government—are dominated by cash.
For more than a century, the ability of corporations and the super-rich to buy in directly has been legally constrained. But the concentration of media ownership in the hands of ever-fewer corporations has vastly enhanced their power.
Already in 2012, the tsunami of dollars pouring in from corporations and super-rich individuals has soared to entirely new levels. Even the floodgates opened by Citizens United can’t handle the flow. With its June decision denying Montana’s attempt to keep some spending restrictions in tact, the John Roberts US Supreme Court has inaugurated an era in which virtually unrestrained “pay-to-play” money will re-define the electoral process. Republicans in the US Senate have also blocked attempts to require that these campaign “donations” be made public.
It’s not hard to guess where this leads. The June, 2012, recall election in Wisconsin saw at least 8 times as much money being spent on protecting Republican governor Scott Walker as was spent to oust him.
Barack Obama has spent much of his presidency courting corporate interests. But he will be out-raised by the corporate/super-rich 1% backing Mitt Romney. A handful of high-profile billionaires will spend “whatever it takes” to put the GOP back into the White House. Just a dozen of them have already provided more than 70% of Romney’s early campaign budget.
Most of this corporate money is being used to persuade voters to oust Obama, which they may well decide to do. But US history shows that some of it can also restrict the ability of Americans to vote. It can then “bend” the vote count in ways the public may not want.
Our nation’s history shows that given the same chance, the Democrats would gladly do the same to the Republicans. And it’s happened many times, especially in the Jim Crow south.
But in 2012, it will be primarily Republicans using gargantuan sums of corporate money to take control of the government from Democrats, and democracy be damned.
We are not writing this in support of Barack Obama or the Democratic Party. We are mystified by their unwillingness to fight for meaningful electoral reform. Both Al Gore and John Kerry were legitimately elected president, but neither was willing to fight for meaningful reform, or even to discuss it. When we broke many of the major stories on the theft of Ohio 2004, it was the Democrats who most fiercely attacked us.
We’re continually asked why the Democrats have been willing since 2000 to sit back and let the GOP get away with this. Frankly, we have no answer.
But for us, the more important reality is that this electoral corruption dooms the ballot as an instrument of real democracy. A system this badly broken means a bi-partisan oligarchy can always deny third and other grassroots parties the use of elections to challenge the status quo, in this case one increasingly defined by war, bigotry, injustice, moneyed privilege and ecological suicide.
Thus it’s been a century since the last significant electoral challenges to the Democrat-Republican corporate domination of the political system.
That challenge was staged by the People’s (Populist) and then Socialist Parties. In rapid succession they rallied huge grassroots followings demanding core changes to the corporate domination of American politics. The 30-year upheaval they represented laid the groundwork for major changes. But it failed to crack the corporate domination of our political system.
The Populists were shattered in 1896 with a combination of co-option by William Jennings Bryan’s Democratic Party and election theft engineered by Mark Hanna’s Republicans. (Republican strategist Karl Rove, a serious student of the 1896 election, considers Mark Hanna to be one of his great heroes).
The Socialists were co-opted and divided in 1916 by the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who then crushed them in the most violent wave of physical repression ever imposed by a US President on a mass movement that derived from the heart of America’s working public.
No third party has since risen up with enough real political clout to threaten corporate power through the electoral system. As long as our ballot box is corrupted and unaccountable, none will.
That one party could steal an election from the other means our democracy, if it could still be called that, is essentially in shambles.
Would the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, the Chamber of Commerce and their related billionaires spend tens of millions of dollars to win the White House but stop short of spending the relatively small amount it would take to flip the vote?
In the larger view, the ability of either (or both) corporate parties to do this means no grassroots party will be allowed to force meaningful change in America—at least not through the ballot box.
But we are citizens of a nation born with the bottom-up overthrow of the planet’s then-most powerful king. As believers in grassroots democracy, we know that the survival instinct is ultimately more powerful than the profit motive. When it comes to the basics, we have no doubt the power of the people will ultimately prevail.
For those working on the 2012 election, and for democracy in general, that will mean an extraordinary commitment to protecting the registered status of millions of Americans, getting them to the polls, guaranteeing their right to vote once there, and making sure there is an accurate vote count—electronic and otherwise—once those votes are cast.
–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are authors of WILL THE GOP STEAL AMERICA’S 2012 ELECTION?, their fifth book on election protection, an e-book at www.harveywasserman.ning.com and freepress.org/store.php#a2012.
*****
Readers: Thoughts? Blog me. This will be the first of many so stay tuned.
Social Butterfly: Thanks for the heads-up and for blogging the missing link :). I corrected the write last night before I saw your 2nd post. So Readers, if you haven’t signed it yet, feel free to sign it now. Thanks. Also as I stated to all my readers last night: FYI: The main heading is almost always a link to the original article should you want to go to the original source.
Robert, RT: Thank you for the list! I perused it and yes it is stunning, and a wealth of information – these articles will be very illuminating to all who read. Thank you, again.
With respect to Obama, I completely agree with you. Obama is a very fair-minded man, which is a characteristic that I appreciate and hold in high regard. But in these circumstances, he needs to think like the GOP think and take ruthless actions against them. If it means investigation and prosecution, he must do it.
Vivien, Sarah: Thanks for the heads-up and helpful advice.
Readers: With respect to comments from Vivien and Sarah, there are many people who hang out in front of grocery stores etc., who claim to register you to vote, but have been hired by repubs to throw away your registration form. Please be careful and either take it to your countys’ official voter registration office or after registration do what was suggested and check on-line.
Another way to ensure that you are registered and that your form was in fact not thrown away is to mark the box that allows you to vote by mail, early. If you check that box you should receive your voting form in the mail within a week. If you don’t get it, then call and make sure that it was indeed turned in. Besides checking online this is another step that won’t leave you left wondering, only to be upset on election day when you are not registered to vote. Then it will be too late.
I am not sure about other states but the last day to register to vote is 15 days before election day, which put the last day as October 22nd. My suggestion is that if you have any question as to whether you are registered or not is to get on it now and check. You can check the status of your voter registration on California by clicking here.
If you want to register to vote online in California, click here. It is very quick and easy. However, if you do so , the site requests permission to contact the DMV for a copy of your signature. Some might not like having their signature on file – I didn’t. What I do suggest is that you visit the website, locate the registration office in your county, fill out the form there and turn it in.
If anyone else has any suggestions please do speak up. Thanks.
peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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