Diebold electronic vote rigging division now an albatross for corporation

Here's some good news for a change.

The rigged voting machines have become an albatross for giant corporation Diebold. They have been trying to shed the division, and when they couldn't, they resorted to changing the name.

KEY EXCERPTS:

After a year and a half of conversely trying to dump their failed voting unit and/or lying to customers about the reliability and security of their voting systems, corporate parent Diebold is giving up the ghost of its election business which, according to an analyst in a Reuters report, was "responsible for less than 10 percent of Diebold's revenue, and 100 percent of its bad publicity."


After a string of disastrous reports on the quality and security of their voting systems, along with plummeting stock prices since last week, it seems clear that Diebold, the once-great, more-than-100-year old company, is doing whatever it can at this point to save the corporate parent. While its stock price (DBD) plummeted at today's opening bell and is currently down some 5.6% from yesterday, the price has begun to rise again in the last hour or so on news of the spin-off.

More than anything, however, the move may well be a harbinger of a coming declaration of bankruptcy for Diebold/Premier, as we see it. With the unit now spun off from the blue chip Diebold parent, declaring bankruptcy or dissolving the company altogether might be less trouble for investors and the main company as a whole, as their extraordinary legal and financial liabilities continue to mount...



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California's profoundly corrupt registrar Connie McCormack was in such a panic about the failing status of the Diebold machines that she made a telling Freudian slip at a meeting of the county supervisors, her bosses:

"I think we have to see what the vendors are going to say about that," McCormack said. "The vendors aren't going to make much money in Los Angeles County if they have to pay $400,000 for the recount."

But Supervisor Gloria Molina upbraided McCormack for her concerns about the vendors' profit margins.

"I think you are walking close to the edge," Molina said. "I don't understand why you are so protective of the vendors. You keep saying you are concerned about what this is going to cost them.

"It's really none of our business. It shouldn't be in our interest to protect the vendors' profits."

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Brad helpfully reminds people how close her relationship with Diebold is with a screenshot of their sales brochure she appears in.




Brad's list of links on growing shit storm for vote rigging companies

STUDIES PROVE EVOTING MACHINES CAN BE RIGGED:

GAO study

MUST READ: economic democracy crushed by tanks & coups again and again but keeps coming back stronger and stronger

This is simply breath-taking in tying together what has happened to us her in the US since the Reagan Revolution, what neoliberalism and resource wars like Iraq have done to the rest of the world, and most importantly, how people fought back again and again and could only be deterred by economic or military force.

This is partly why Hugo Chavez is so terrifying to the corporate world: not that he is so far left but because their usual tools failed to remove him or bring him to heel. When they called their bought off generals for a coup enough of the Venezuelan people and even enough of the military saw Chavez was looking out for their interests and the economic elite were not.

Whether the Democrats will really put the people before their corporate donors remains to be seen, but this is the direction we MUST push them in if we in the middle and working class don't want to end up living in a cardboard box in a Third World slum in the middle of North America.

EXCERPTS:











Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

Naomi Klein: From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks, "The Quest to Impose a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions"

This idea of our intellectual and ideological failure is the dominant narrative of our time. It’s embedded in all the catchphrases that we’ve been referring to. “There is no alternative,” said Thatcher. “History has ended,” said Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking has already been done, the consensus is there. Now, the premise of all these proclamations was that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was conquering every corner of the globe because all other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.

Now, it’s worth remembering when these pronouncements were being made that what was failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare state, which has produced the highest standard of living by UN measures in the world, or at least it did before my government started embracing some of these ideas. It wasn't the so-called Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a combination of trade protections to nurture and develop national industry, even when that meant keeping American products out and preventing foreign ownership, as well as maintaining government control over key assets, like water and electricity. These policies did not create explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as we see today. But record levels of profit and a rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has been attacked in these past thirty years.

***
Now, I want to use the rest of my time just to say that this was not the first time, that this -- if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again. Many of you were here for the opening address from Ricardo Lagos, the former president of Chile, who talked about another September 11th, which was another one of those moments, a far more significant one, when a very important democratic alternative, the real third way, not Tony Blair's third way, but the real third way between totalitarian communism and extreme capitalism was being forged in Chile. And that was the great threat.

And we know that now through all of the declassified documents. There’s a really revealing one: a correspondence between Henry Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he actually wrote was, “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the world…The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” So that alternative, that other world, had to be blasted out of the way, and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.

***

We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They're popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.

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A good brief summary of neoliberalism

How "economic hit men" set it up and enforce it

How Bush is plundering Iraq's OIL

Klein on the plunder of Iraq

ANIMATION: Rove's work done, he morphs back to a pig's ass

Click pic to see flick

POLL CHARTS: Iraqis don't want to give OIL WEALTH to Bush cronies

Not surprisingly, a recent poll of Iraqis commissioned by Oil Change and other groups found that they know their oil income could provide a decent living for their people.

Iraqis would also prefer that their national oil company develop their oil NOT transnational oil companies, which directly contradicts the intent of the Bush-backed Hydrocarbon Law which will give up to 80% of Iraq's oil income to companies like Chevron, Exxon, and Shell.

Iraqis also said they don't haven't heard enough about Bush's oil law to feel informed on it--sounds a lot like the Patriot Act and just about everything else the Bushies force on us with as little debate and scrutiny as they can get away with.

If we were even remotely interested in teaching the Iraqis democracy, Washington, DC would be talking about the results of this poll. But they don't because as Huffpost blogger Robert Naiman said:

If supporters of continuing the indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq were forced to concede that Iraqis don't support what the U.S. is doing -- not to mention that nearly a million Iraqis have died -- the whole argument about "cut and run" would be exposed as a cruel farce. If one is engaged in an immoral enterprise, there's nothing brave about "staying the course."

FULL TEXT

Click any chart to see full-sized.

This is the crucial one:


Questions: Have you been kept in the dark and fed on bullshit?




More on this poll

OIL THEFT motive for IRAQ WAR resources

Wear orange until Bush and Cheney are impeached

I went to the fabric store to buy three different kinds of orange fabrics to mess around with. The high school girl who cut it for me ask why so much of the same color and I told her the World Can't Wait has come up with this campaign to show national, public support for impeaching Bush & Cheney. She got excited and said she was going to get all her friends to do it too.

The campaign would like to get critical mass on this by Labor Day, and especially have people wearing orange on ORANGE FRIDAYS.



The choice of colors has a couple of advantages:

• It echoes the orange revolution in the Ukraine, which is a great irony since Bush criticized that government for rigging elections when the exit polls didn't match the vote.
  
  
• Orange is a bright, annoying color, most people don't wear in most situations.
  
  
• Enough construction workers wear orange that it will make it look like even more support the campaign.
  
  
• It is also the color of the jumpsuits of the prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
  
  
• Rush Limbaugh has been selling orange "Club Gitmo" wear for a while, so some dittoheads will unwittingly be participating in the campaign.
  
  

The World Can't Wait has bandanas and tees, but if you can't afford to buy anything from them, you could go to a thrift store and buy a couple of orange tee shirts, or a strip of fabric from a fabric store to make a bandana, scarf, or armband. You can also buy one of those rubber wristbands in orange.





Some variations you can do with this:

• Tie an orange ribbon to the antenna on your car or side mirrors.
  
  
• Send an orange postcard to your senators and reps with just the words IMPEACH NOW on it. (or maybe tell them you'll wear orange until they do their job and impeach, so every time they see the color they'll remember they aren't doing their job).
  
  
• Send that postcard to the White House too. What the hell. You know you're on the list already.
  
  
• Put an orange banner or background on your blog.
  
  
• You might also send a nice orange tie or scarf to your favorite White House press corps reporter and say you would be honored if they wore it at press conferences, especially when they're with Bush himself. (Whether or not you tell the reporter the significance of the color is up to you). Hell, Helen Thomas might wear it even if you tell her what it's for.
  
  
• Even better, when Cheney goes hunting, he will be supporting impeaching himself.
  
  

Will you participate in this campaign?

before 93 WTC bombing, FBI wanted mole to give bombers LIVE explosives

The gist of it is, the mole or informant was so freaked out by the suggestion that he started taping his conversations with his handlers and presented them as evidence in court. He also said that if the FBI had listened to his advice, let him be in on the bomb-making and substitute harmless powder for the explosives, he could have prevented the bombing.

What does that have to do with anything at this late date?

There are two facts about the "War on Terror" that are routinely ignored by the American media, but not by the rest of the world:

• the war is not about terrorism but controlling oil with tens of trillions of dollars and other natural resources.

• acts of terrorism can be provoked or even staged to suit a political agenda.

Author of the torture memos (which makes him a prima facie war criminal) said as much in an Los Angeles Times column:

Another tool would have our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within Al Qaeda's ranks, causing operatives to doubt others' identities and to question the validity of communications.

LA Times link

And so did Donald Rumsfeld when he was Secretary of Defense:

The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.

Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.

LA Times link

There is a long history of the FBI and intel agencies infiltrating groups like the Klan, militias, and foreign terrorist groups, not just to gather information, but to prod them to act, then catch them in the act.

Or if it is more politically expedient, NOT catch them, as the story below seems to imply.

Oddly enought, two of the 9/11 hijackers lived with an FBI informant, and two of the hijackers were supported by Saudi intelligence agents according to Sen. Bob Graham, who co-chaired the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11.

If your friend kills your wife and you know it and still have a beer with him every week, is it unreasonable to assume you wanted him to kill your wife?

KEY EXCERPTS:





Plot Warning Is Reviewed By the F.B.I.
BLUMENTHAL, RALPH. New York Times. Oct 29, 1993. pg. B.1

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reviewing the allegations of an informer who said after the World Trade Center explosion that he had warned law-enforcement agents of a plot to build a bomb, and that if they had worked with him, they would have prevented the blast, officials said.

But some officials disputed important parts of the informant's account yesterday, saying that conversations with him took place half a year before the attack on the trade center, and months before the bomb was actually built.

The comments of the informer, Emad A. Salem, are in transcripts of telephone conversations with the police and F.B.I. agents that Mr. Salem secretly recorded. In the transcripts, Mr. Salem is quoted as saying that the bombing could have been foiled but for an F.B.I. supervisor's rejection of a plan to have him work with the plotters building the bomb, then substitute harmless powder for the explosives.

The review of Mr. Salem's allegations that has been undertaken by the F.B.I. is not a formal investigation. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which looks into suspected ethical lapses, has not been called in, officials said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity. Reno Declines to Comment

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WONKETTE: hooker going to Iraq Green Zone says NO troops--private contractors ONLY

Wonkette did a generally snarky piece on sending escorts over to entertain the hired guns, but one part of the escorts post stood out:

My apologies but at this time I am unable to plan any meetings w/active duty military. (*The members of PMC community has an exclusive arrangement during this visit*) Kisses ~Tori

http://wonkette.com/politics/sex-on-the-breach-dept\'/i...

I would not necessarily advocate sending hookers over to Iraq, but if some were going anyway, they should offer their services to every soldier before a single mercenary or dickless ass weasel from Liberty University cowering in the Green Zone while he privatizes Iraq's water or something.

Maybe that's how Democrats could end the war--simply stop funding escorts being flown into the Green Zone until it turns into one big blue ball on the map with the righties begging for the helicopter on the roof to take them home.

How Democrats can be to the right of the GOP gay issues AND PRO gay marriage

As I listened to the umpteenth story these last seven years on Republican torture it occurred to me that Democrats have a profound advantage on gay issues--we only support VOLUNTARY gay sex.

When the Abu Ghraib story broke, the defenses offered by the right in addition to the "few bad apples" lie was that it was no worse than a fraternity hazing or "Skull & Bones initiation" as Rush Limbaugh said (an inadvertent slip revealing what kind of people populate these 'elite' fraternities).

So I guess these republicans and their apologists think VOLUNTARY gay sex is bad, but COERCING likely heterosexuals to have gay sex at Abu Ghraib and in out of control police stations on "Guiliani time" where I seem to recall a guy in custody being sodomized with a plunger. Bush has fought tooth and nail to keep the power to do these tortures and only this week barred the use of sexual torture (and even then left some wiggle room so he could still authorize it). On a less trumpeted issue, it's not hard to figure out which side of the prison rape issue republicans fall on. Most have no trouble with gay rape of heterosexuals when it's part of punishing someone for selling a dime bag of pot or the like (truly violent offenders or big gangsters aren't in much danger).

The basis of right wing concern about gays is that they will somehow "convert" people to be gay. The vast majority of gays, especially those who want to get married, want to do their gay things only with other gays.

By contrast, if you are a heterosexual and cross the GOP, you could be forced to perform gay sex acts.

There's got to be a way to boil this down to a bumper sticker.

I bring this issue up at all because I know some democratic candidates for president will be tempted co-opt GOP positions on gays like opposing gay marriage and or even civil unions.

This approach could give them a chance to appeal to right wing homophobes without kicking a loyal constituency in the nuts as supposed "centrist" Democrats seem so willing to do.

Would saying Dems only support VOLUNTARY gay sex help with righties?
	NO-- the right would really prefer lynching. anything that emphasizes live and let live is repugnant to them
	NO--righties would not be able to process something they didn't hear from Rush or Fox News. They are the gimp locked in the trunk of the right wing co
	MAYBE--if it got enough airplay and Democrats had the balls to do it (two ginormous and unlikely ifs)
	YES--the fear of being raped would trump the more obtuse threat of being converted by osmosis if gays married.
	I'm George W. Bush, and sodomy is not gay unless I say so. See sodomy is gay sex between two terrist loving Democrats. When you rape a prisoner, yur jes showin' em who's boss.
	other
Free polls from Pollhost.com

CIA World Factbook Deletes facts--on military spending

I went to get a link on the military spending chart in the CIA World Factbook and noticed it had changed from dollars spent to percentage of GDP, so it now looks like this:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-fact...



Wow! Our military spending looks pretty modest there--less than Greece or Chad.

In the old dollar chart, we were number ONE and spent eight times as much as number two, China. I happened to have a screenshot of it on my hard drive:




I can see why some would argue that the dollar figure is misleading. We have higher labor costs to pay our soldiers, and our weapons are a lot more expensive (although the weapons expense in some cases like aircraft and electronics do give us a qualitative edge). But the GDP percentage is even more misleading. The casual observer might assume that Yemen or Syria could put up a good fight against us or even invade us since they spend so much more of their GDP than us when in reality we could wipe out most of their military in an afternoon of airstrikes (occupation would be another matter).

It would be hard to sell wars without that misperception though. If someone realized that our military spends more on toilet paper than the boogey man of the month spends on their whole military, they might not get scared. The same is true about nukes. Whenever the Bushies or Congress talk about the nuclear "threat" from Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, they conveniently leave out that we have 10,000 nuclear warheads and if any of those countries nuked us or gave nukes to terrorists who did, we could burn that country off the map and have enough left to kill everyone on earth five times. We forget that, but the rest of the world doesn't.

If the CIA thought that the dollar figure was misleading, they could have corrected that with caveats and MORE information like troop levels, number of aircraft carriers, and so on that can be found in public domain sources anyway. I suspect this change wasn't the CIA's idea though. This is the kind of statistical slight of hand a public relations firm would come up with and in fact when a flak for drug companies was asked why Americans pay more for prescription drugs than any other country, especially since our tax dollars help pay to develop the drug, the flak said, "Well, Americans pay a smaller percentage of their income on drugs than most other countries," as if the drug companies were selfless non-profits charging based on ability to pay.

I hope when the Bushies are gone this kind of obfuscation will go with them.

We need more "inconvenient truths:" here's a couple

FOREIGN POLICY: American foreign policy for the last few decades has had little to do with our security or even our economic well-being, nor does it promote the welfare or democracy of countries on the receiving end. Instead, neoliberalism, NAFTA, GATT, WTO, World Bank, and the IMF serve a handful of very wealthy people and corporations.

Americans ignorance of this is how 9/11 can happen and a president can get away with saying it was because they "hate our freedom."

Ignorance of this also kept alarm bells from going off when Bush applied the same program to America that has been used on Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere with the same disastrous results: run up gigantic government debts that can't possibly be paid, and collect by forcing the country to drastically cut social services and privatize everything including essential services like WATER, and sell off their natural resources for a song, allowing all the profits to be expropriated.

CLASS: Class exists. Class warfare exists. If Rush Limbaugh screams about his opponents committing class warfare, it's because the class he serves is winning and don't want anyone to notice. America has always prided itself on access to upward mobility and rags to riches stories, but right now that path is narrower and steeper. We need to open it up.

CULTURAL ISSUES: Both Democrats and Republicans prefer to talk about gay marriage, abortion, flag desecration, prayer in school, and all those other symbolic cultural issues because while people are getting in a lather about something that probably doesn't affect them, the pols can quietly line their pockets and the pockets of their cronies. Whether abortion is legal or not or your gay neighbors are married is not going to help you put food on the table, pay for you to go to the doctor, or put your kid through college. All of those things cost money and some are hard to solve. By contrast, prayer, abortion, etc. costs nothing (at least to the politicians). When a pol hears you talking about that stuff, he breathes a sigh of relief--for all he cares, you could be talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.


DEFENSE: Only a small portion of our "defense" budget is actually for defense. China is an instructive example. They spend about a seventh what we do on defense and yet they are in no danger of being invaded or likely even attacked. Why? They would be hell to occupy. Similarly, if we are having trouble occupying a medium-small country like Iraq, imagine some other country trying to occupy us. Apart from having to cross one of two oceans, every yahoo and his brother have a gun and lots of places to hide and shoot at the for'ners. We would be a pain in the ass.

Most of our defense budget is for OFFENSE, either protecting economic interests overseas or acquiring more. No one in the Persian Gulf region would come over here to attack us if we weren't propping up dictators, and now trying to install the semblance of democracy (so long as it lets our companies pump the oil, at a pace and price of the companies choosing) at the barrel of a gun.

Every war has at least one side who is a thief, sometimes both. He goes to another country to steal their land and resources. Hitler said this plainly in the Hossbach Memorandum before the war. Rarely is an invasion about anything else--maybe never. I don't suppose Hawaii was a threat to us when we annexed them unless they were going to paddle over here and throw pineapples at California.

Marine Corps General and two time Medal of Honor winner Smedley Butler said it best:

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

FULL TEXT:
http://www.hackvan.com/pub/stig/anti-govt/...

When someone of either party tells you we need a Cold War size military, they have one of three things in mind:

• looking tougher than the other guy
  
  
• getting donations from defense contractors
  
  
• using the military to help other business interests.
  

Defense could probably be done with a fourth of our defense budget.

MORALITY IN GOVERNMENT: There is none except what we force them to have. None. Most politicians would not only kill an Iraqi to fill their friends pockets, they would kill you. Here they don't do it with bombs but by blocking safety regulations like inspecting beef for Mad Cow Disease or having safety testing for supplements. I worked for an attorney service and served papers on the company that made herbal ecstasy. Seven kids died at one party from taking it. Orrin Hatch takes money from the supplement industry and bars any testing or safety warnings. Members of both party either serve or cringe before the health insurance industry, which denies millions of us health care by pricing us out of the market or worse, not approving of coverage we paid for and putting us on hold until we die. Politicians know those health care stories. Lots of their constituents have called and said their wife or husband or kid died because they were denied care or couldn't afford it in the first place, and the politician thinks,

"Hmmm...save lives or get a campaign donation. Those insurance companies would really chew my ass if I went after them. Probably back my opponent...Marcy! Send these people an autographed photo! That ought to make them happy."

Got any to add?