Sunday, August 31, 2008

How to Steal an Election Successfully

Lessons from the 2004 Election

By Jacqueline Marcus

1)
Corporate media networks play the largest role in stealing an election by

• Promoting skewed and inexplicable corporate polls that claim that Obama and McCain are “dead even”.

• Diminish percentage of millions of Black, Latino, Youth and Gay votes.

Corporate pundits must continue to repeat the following lies for talking point excuses once cheating is accomplished:

• Obama is the underdog – has a long way to catch up with McCain
• Obama is black; use race card by raising doubts
• Obama lacks experience
• Obama can’t win over Hillary voters

2) Make sure to repeat all the same cheating programming used in the 2004 Election

• Use only one voting machine in Democratic Southern State Black voting sectors for thousands of voters so that they’ll become discouraged and leave.

• Eliminate the millions and millions of Absent-T ballots (international and national).

• And most importantly, switch as many votes as possible in so-called battle-ground states to McCain via Diebold Electronic cheating machines


3) Lastly, light up the Media Networks’ Election Maps on Election Night to Red and call it a day

McCain Visits Three Mile Island and Valdez!

The Two Worst Nuclear and Oil Disasters in the U.S.

By Jacqueline Marcus

…It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth…

The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in the corner of the sky…

—Paul Simon, “The Boy in the Bubble”


Senator McCain looks rather pathetic, campaigning for the oil and nuclear industries at a time when Americans have made the shift to Green Technologies for energy solutions. But if John insists on making such a tragic mistake, then he should visit the memorable Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant and afterwards, make his pitch for drilling on the coast of Alaska where the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred, the two worst nuclear and oil disasters in the United States.

On March 28, 1979, America’s worst nuclear accident occurred at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Half the fuel melted in one of two nuclear reactors. The community was exposed to dangerous amounts of radioactivity leaked from the reactor.



“The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant suffered a partial meltdown. Within weeks attorneys filed a class action suit against Metropolitan Edison Company (a subsidiary of General Public Utilities) on behalf of all businesses and residents within 25 miles of the plant.

Over 2,000 personal injury claims were filed, with plaintiffs claiming a variety of health injuries caused by gamma radiation exposure. The Pennsylvania district court quickly consolidated the claims into ten test cases.” (1)


Next stop: the coast of Alaska…


Exxon Valdez spilled approximately 10.9 million gallons of its 53 million gallon cargo of Prudhoe Bay crude oil. Eight of the eleven tanks on board were damaged. The oil spill impacted over 1,100 miles of non-continuous coastline in Alaska, making the Exxon Valdez the largest oil spill to date in U.S. waters.

Exxon/Mobile earns on the average 12 million dollars an hour in profits. (2) Nevertheless, Exxon/Mobile resisted paying for extensive, long-term damage from the massive oil sludge that ruined Alaska’s pristine coastal shores and fishing industry. The Bush Supreme Court ruled in Exxon/Mobile’s favor, reducing punitive damages to five hundred million dollars, pocket change for this polluting industry.

At the same time, Exxon/Mobile spared no expense on their “Deny Global Warming” media campaign; Exxon/Mobile paid millions of dollars to media networks for the sole purpose of confusing the public on the facts of global warming because, after all, global warming is an “inconvenient truth” to the oil industry. (3)

These are the sort of ruthless Bush policy investors that are running McCain’s campaign.

When McCain claims that there were “no oil spills from Katrina,” when the evidence of major oil spills in the Gulf have become common knowledge, it makes the seventy-one-year old McCain look like an old, doddering liar. In any event, such claims seriously harm his credibility. In the Bush-FOXTV tradition, McCain assumes that no one is informed – so he can make up lies as he goes and no one will notice. He’s right that the media will cover for him by either not informing the public about the inconvenient oil and nuclear facts or by editing McCain’s fabrications with sound-bites as seen on Katie Couric’s CBS Evening News Broadcast. (4)

The public generally scoffs at the network news with the awareness that they are heavily funded by the same industrial polluters running McCain’s campaign such as Exxon/Mobile.

However, Americans have had eight long, nightmarish years to learn the truth about the corrupt media organizations. Recall Tom Brokaw, for example, dazzled by Rumfeld’s “Shock and Awe” campaign as though it were a Fourth of July celebration. In short, if the network reporters were “watchdogs for the public welfare,” if they had been as critical about the Bush administration’s war policies as they were about Clinton’s silly sex affair, a “White House in Crisis” 24/7 impeach Bill Clinton circus show for an entire year, the Iraq invasion would have been stopped in its tracks. The contrast between the coverage of Clinton’s affair and Bush’s invasion of Iraq, torture practices, elimination of habeas corpus, to name only a few high crimes from a long list of crimes – is absolutely mind-boggling. The public is now exceedingly aware of the double standard, which explains why the public ratings of the national network news broadcasts are lower than the ratings for Bush. And that’s low!

It also explains why smear campaigns against Senator Obama are not working so well. In Colorado, Obama's campaign sold 80,000 seats to the public for the Democratic National Convention. Every seat – sold in a single afternoon.
As for those "dead even" polls...corporate polls can be easily skewed. We need to demand how these polls are taken i.e. from where, from whom and how many people are solicited? We also need to remember the Primary voting numbers: Democratic voters outnumbered Republican voters 2 to 1 and often 3 to 1 according to the individual vote counts. The public and journalists ought to be far more skeptical about the latest corporate polls.

McCain usually can’t attract more than one hundred people, if that, at his speeches. Obviously, McCain’s energy and war policies are the same as Bush’s. Poll after poll demonstrates that the majority of Americans want to protect our environment and they’re angry about billions of tax dollars going to a dozen or so war contractors instead of investing in our own country’s needs. Unless you’re a stockholder investing in the late century’s oil, nuclear and oil industries, the rest of the world has moved on to Green Technologies. Senator Obama represents the majority of Americans who want new jobs and investments in hybrid, electric, solar and wind energy.

By contrast, McCain represents an industry that is on the decline, antiquated, and no longer acceptable for several life-threatening reasons: We are now experiencing the dire consequences of global warming (glaciers rapidly melting, reefs dying, forests burning, record-breaking heat waves, recurring hurricanes, droughts and floods, to name a few factual events in recent years).

As for nuclear power, it’s just too dangerous. The Diablo Nuclear Power Plant on the central coast of California, for instance, sits right on the San Andreas Fault. Geologists predict that a major earthquake is not a matter of “if” but “when” in California. Earthquakes and nuclear power plants are a deadly mix, if you get the picture. Russia’s tragic nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl and Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island should be enough of a warning for us all.

So when McCain campaigns for oil and nuclear energy, he is speaking for the Dow Jones Industrial stockholders who are desperately clinging to an Industrial Age that is neither economically viable nor environmentally safe.

Nuclear power and oil are a Three Mile Island / Valdez / global warming disaster waiting to happen. That’s not a fear tactic, that’s not paranoia: that’s based on hard evidence, practical scientific knowledge and a moral concern for the safety of the public’s welfare. The truth is American voters are demanding hybrid, electric, solar and wind for new energy sources. And Green Companies are champing at the bit, ready to accommodate them. Sorry, John, but no one can stop progress.



Sources

1. FRONTLINE / PBS.org

2. “Exxon posts record $11.68 billion profit : World's largest publicly traded oil firm makes $1,485.55 a second in the quarter, but misses forecasts” (CNNMoney.com
http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/31/news/companies/exxon_profits/index.htm?cnn=yes)


3. “Global Warming Denial Exposed” (
http://www.exxposeexxon.com/)

4. “Did CBS and Katie Couric Conspire to Make McCain Look Better?”

(
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/07/did_cbs_and_katie_couric_consp.html)