"Corporations and Democracy" interviews Wisconsin democracy activist Ben Manski

Ben Manski, executive director of Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution and spokesperson for the Wisconsin Wave, talks to Steve Scalmanini and Annie Esposito, hosts of the August 19 edition of Corporations and Democracy, heard on KZYX&Z-FM, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting in Philo, California.

Ben, Steve, and Annie discuss heartland progressive populism and resistance to attacks on local government in Benton Harbor and other Michigan towns, to the results of the recent Wisconsin recall elections, including allegations of pro-GOP election fraud in a well-to-do county (not the first time this has happened!). Ben reviews the history of home rule provisions and the need to strengthen them today to provide a democratic bulwark against corporate personhood and corporate rule.

Listen online here!

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"Hacking Democracy" screens in Peterborough, NH

The documentary "Hacking Democracy" will be shown on Wednesday, September 7 at the Peterborough, NH Town Library, 2 Concord Street. The film starts at 7 p.m. You can reach the library at (603) 924-8040.

The documentary, first broadcast on HBO, exposes the dangers of voting machines widely used in the US. Electronic voting machines count approximately 90% of our votes in county, state and federal elections. The technology is also increasingly being used across the world, including in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe and Latin America. Filmed over three years, Hacking Democracy follows a team of citizen activists and hackers as they take on the electronic voting industry, targeting the Diebold corporation, and uncovers incendiary evidence from the trash cans of Texas to the ballot boxes of Ohio, exposing secrecy, discarded votes, hackable software and election officials rigging the presidential recount.

Ultimately proving our votes can be stolen without a trace, "Hacking Democracy" culminates in the famous 'Hursti Hack'; a duel between the Diebold voting machines and a computer hacker from Finland - with America's democracy at stake.

Even though this is not a new film, easily-manipulated electronic voting equipment continues to threaten the integrity of our elections. Come see the film and talk with others about what can be done to protect the vote.

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Washington and change: cash you can believe in

Lobbyist and special interest money have turned the city of Washington into a kind of Oz, with its struggling, low-income neighborhoods hidden out of sight of the rich and powerful, just as systemic national problems of poverty, stagnant wages, haphazard education and health care, and unemployment seem to have dropped off the radar of the playmakers funding this year's crop of 501 c 4's and 6's.

by Michael Winship. Posted October 14 on Truthout
"Somebody once said the Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency." So John F. Kennedy famously remarked in 1961 and so the town seemed to remain when I first moved there in 1969 to go to school.

Clerks in dusty stores moved with the majestic inertia of tall ships becalmed. You could count the number of good restaurants on the fingers of one hand - okay, maybe two hands. There was a rendering plant on the south side of K Street that turned animal carcasses into glue; when the wind blew the wrong way, the awful smell brought tears to the eyes of those who lived and shopped along the fashionable lanes of Georgetown.

There were still "temporary" buildings on the National Mall that had been there since the end of World War I, filled with government workers. But any citizen could freely walk the corridors of Congress, enter a member's office to leave an opinion or pick up a pass for the visitors' galleries of the House or Senate, ride that little subway that runs underneath the Capitol. No campaign contributions required.

Or so it seemed to a white, middle-class college kid. Washington also was a city in decline. Not quite a year and a half had passed since the three days of riots that followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Thirteen people had died, more than a thousand were hurt and you could still see piles of rubble and burned out storefronts. Hundreds of businesses had been damaged or destroyed.

Robert Reich - the new chairman of the nonpartisan, citizens' lobby Common Cause - remembers DC in those days, too. He interned for Bobby Kennedy and later at the Federal Trade Commission. Then, the capital changed. By the time Reich became President Clinton's secretary of labor in 1993, poverty was still rampant in the city, but much of it had been shoved beyond the sightlines of the rich and powerful. "Washington was much fancier," he recalled. "It almost glittered - the hotels and the bistros and the restaurants - and the money."

Speaking at Common Cause's 40th anniversary dinner on October 6, Reich noted, "It's even wealthier today. You walk around Washington and you see what it is and that money is here for one reason. It may go into the hands of people who are lawyers and public relations people and lobbyists but it is here for one reason and that is to influence our democracy. We have never seen in American history as much money flowing to our nation's capitol. This election that is coming up is an election in which for the first time that I can remember there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to candidates and we have no way of knowing who is providing this money at all. Complete, absolute secrecy."

Kenneth Vogel at the web site Politico.com echoes Reich: "Never in modern political history has there been so much secret money gushing into an American election. By Election Day, independent groups will have aired more than $200 million worth of campaign ads using cash that can't be traced back to its original source, predicts Fred Wertheimer, president of the non-profit group Democracy 21. 'And this is just the beginning,' Wertheimer said. 'Unless we get some changes here to mitigate this problem, I would expect we will see $500 million or more in 2012.'"

This year "has raised two basic questions that strike at the very core of the ethos of the campaign-finance reform effort: Can the flow of money into elections be limited if the courts have deemed political giving and spending a First Amendment right? Can any system of rules to make money more transparent ever keep up with the legal devices that powerful interests use to keep their influence hidden?"

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This is not just the fault of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, although it has unleashed vast new sums of cash into the system - compare this year's elections with the midterms of four years ago. Nor is it yet because of foreign money attempting to influence elections although, Karl Rove and the US Chamber of Commerce's denials to the contrary, this is a clear and present danger. And true, it's not solely because of deep corporate pockets that Democrats seem to be headed toward a significant setback in three weeks; a still faltering economy and lack of jobs are giving them a brutal slapping around.

But the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act has been eviscerated by the courts and what's left of it is barely enforced by the Federal Election Commission. The same goes for various provisions of the federal tax code, which need not only stricter enforcement, but beefing up.

The October 12 Washington Post editorialized:

"Nonprofit advocacy groups, known as 501(c)(4)s, are permitted to engage in political advocacy as long as that is not their primary purpose. Meanwhile, these groups do not have to reveal the identities of their donors. IRS regulations bar such organizations from 'direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office,' but as a practical matter, these limits have not made much difference.

"One such Republican-leaning group, American Crossroads GPS, has touted its ability to keep donor names confidential even as it runs ads in key races. Similarly, trade associations such as the Chamber of Commerce, organized under section 501(c)(6) of the tax code, are not required to disclose donors and are permitted even greater leeway to engage in political activity."

Unfortunately, while the voting public expresses concern over campaign spending, it's not very high on their agenda; most believe it will take an outrage such as Watergate, or at least another Jack Abramoff influence peddling-type scandal to get reform back on the tracks.

Campaign finance reform has been a goal of the organization Common Cause since it was founded in 1970 by the great John Gardner, a Republican.

My friend and colleague Bill Moyers ended their anniversary dinner last week with a call to action, invoking the memory of Gardner and another prominent member of the GOP:

"The founder of Common Cause was a prophet in seeing money as the dagger directed at the heart of democracy," Moyers said. "Like his fellow Republican Teddy Roosevelt, he opposed the 'naked robbery' of the public's trust. A century ago, in one of the most powerful speeches in American political history, Roosevelt said: 'It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue; it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft, if we do not resent the kinds of wrong and injustice that injuriously affect the whole nation, not merely our democratic form of government but our civilization itself cannot endure.'"

Moyers concluded, "The only way to defeat organized money is with organized people. Now it's your turn."

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Computer vote count warning from Election Defense Alliance

Two warnings on the security of the 2010 vote--with so many close races Election Defense Alliance provides these hair-raising reports on the hackability of electronic voting machines. Check out the second video for a look at some of the specific vulnerabilities of both touch screen and optical scan voting machines.

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You ought to know... The Personhood Song!

As sung by Raging Grannies and others to the tune of "This Land is Your Land"

CHORUS:
I am a person, you are a person,
With flesh and blood and with mind and conscience.
The corporation is not a person.
That word belongs to you and me.

They rape and plunder the world's resources,
Destroying forests and killing wildlife.
The corporation must turn a profit,
Trampling over you and me.

They dump big money into elections,
Buying our Congress and Legislatures.
The corporation, a legal fiction,
Now has more rights than you and me.

The 1st Amendment protects our freedom
Of free expression and of religion.
The corporations have gone and stole it.
Those rights belong to you and me.

The 4th Amendment requires warrants
For search and seizure; but corporations
Evading health codes and regulations
And environmental laws.

Whenever Walmart destroys a Main Street
And all the people rise us in protest,
The corporate cries of "Discrimination!"
Over-ride democracy.

If "We the People" are truly sovereign
And rule the country through our elections,
Then we must take back from corporations
Rights that were meant for you and me.

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Citizens United Against Citizens United rises again

We wrote a few weeks ago about Citizens United threatening an organization with copyright infringement because of the group's clever, and entirely apropos Facebook group name: Citizens United Against Citizens United.

The Facebook group was organized by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. The organization, facing a possible suit with few resources, took a step back and changed the group's name to United Citizens Against Citizens United.

But you should never waste a good name. So Public Citizen has stepped in and adopted the name, setting up a website, CitizensUnitedAgainstCitizensUnited.org, to promote the Fair Elections Act, disclosure laws, and a constitutional amendment barring corporate access to the First Amendment.

Public Citizen notes some early effects of Citizens United are already being seen, "with states throwing out restrictions on corporate election spending, the Chamber of Commerce stuffing its coffers to run election ads later this year, various political committees and advocacy groups clamoring for corporate contributions, and corporate insiders confirming that Citizens United signaled to business that there is no longer reason to exercise restraint in political spending." They also point out that Citizens United is headhunting for two documentary producers, no doubt expecting a busy election season ahead.

Public Citizen adds "should Citizens United come after Public Citizen as it did the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Public Citizen is ready. Merely using the words citizens united in a URL does not constitute trademark infringement, according to Paul Alan Levy, a Public Citizen attorney who specializes in trademark law and Internet free speech."

Or perhaps Citizens United could start a Facebook group of its own: "Citizens United Against Citizens United Against Citizens United."

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Department of Justice says ES&S must sell off e-voting division purchased from Diebold

The Brad Blog reports that the Anti-trust division of the Department of Justice has ruled that Election Systems & Software, Inc.'s purchase of Diebold's e-voting division has created a voting machine monopoly. Had it stood, the purchase, made last September at rock-bottom prices, would have resulted in one privately-held and notoriously partisan corporation tallying some 70% of the votes cast in the nation.

The purchase was already under investigation by 14 different states, and had been opposed by election integrity groups, ES&S's competitor Hart Intercivic, the New York Times editorial board, and Senate Rules Committee chair Charles Schumer (D-NY).

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Massachusetts' special election fallout

Was it fair?

A Brad Blog follow-up on the integrity of the elections noted that Democrat Martha Coakley conceded early in the night, despite votes being left uncounted and reports of some voters being handed ballots "pre-marked" for her opponent, Scott Brown. Brad reports that

...a group of election integrity experts, after having posted an "Orange Alert" yesterday about the serious e-voting concerns in today's election, have sent an open letter to Sec. of State Bill Galvin, along with a public records request PDF, calling for the retention of all election materials, such as voted, spoiled, and unvoted ballots, as well as all of the easily-tampered-with memory cards and electronic databases, etc., to ensure they are all secured and available for inspection by the public after the close of polls.

Meanwhile, progressives feel used and frustrated. The state's democratic activists are having a hard time coming up with a contender for 2012.

And what about health care reform? Brown was elected on a "stop the bill" platform, but the House could pass the Senate's version of the reform bill without a peep from the 41st senator. This is only a step in the wrong direction if single payer activists take it as a defeat and stop working toward systemic change that will guarantee care for all. Here's a good guess: while many voters were wary of the cost of the health care bill, very few of them know that a single payer system will offer more care for less cost. We have our work cut out for us.

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Back and forth on the art of the possible in health care legislation

Grassroots activism, most compellingly by doctors, nurses, and patients, nudged single payer into the public eye in 2009 and, at times, into Congress, although there was never a debate or vote on the single payer bill, HR 676, or the Weiner and Sanders amendments that would have substituted single payer programs for the House and Senate bills. In 2010, the underwhelming end result of a year of citizen activism and government dealmaking has progressives dismayed about the pending legislation, and their criticisms are, in turn, getting some attention from mainstream media.

Much of the mainstream commentary urges the left to stop whining. Some compare health care reform to social security, which itself started small, with delays in implementation and major exemptions. Of course, there was never a private "social security industry" out to protect its interests against the expansion of a popular and vital public program. On yesterday's edition of Democracy Now!, writer and surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande defended Massachusetts' program of individual mandates with subsidies, and said that the current reform bill could, in time, lead to a single payer system. But will a future committed movement to "reform health care reform" be able to make headway against the same corporate interests who limited the scope of legislation in this go round?

Hendrik Hertzberg blames breakdowns in the legislative process, particularly in the Senate, and says progressive anger at Democrats is misdirected. In reply, Firedoglake's Marcy Wheeler points out that progressives' criticisms have been well-directed at deserved Democratic party targets, and for specific reasons.

The lack of a real conference committee is another criticism well-directed, since important changes to the bill, including empowering states to institute their own single payer systems if they choose, were hopefully going to be addressed there. And, as C-SPAN argues, negotiations, whatever form they take, need to proceed on camera. Otherwise, who runs the show? A select number of legislators (working for a not-so-select coterie of lobbyists and industries), who, as John Nichols writes, "are already thinking--make that, already worrying--about the fall and who have set themselves up as conduits for campaign cash."

Finally, there is growing concern on the right and the left as to whether an individual mandate sets a dangerous precedent--kicking privatization up a notch by requiring citizens to buy into the services of private corporations.

Critics of health care reform are not just sniping at a party or a person who didn't live up to the campaign hype. The state of the final health care bill and the path it took points up some serious systemic flaws in our governance and in the way we allow corporate interests to influence legislation and legislators. Despite hyperbole in the comments sections of some blogs, these criticisms point to the need for ongoing work not only on health care, but also governance, campaign finance, and corporate personhood. The challenge for activists in 2010 and beyond is to organize in a way that recognizes we are dealing with politics and the "art of the [incremental] possible", but continues to advance on all these issues as part of a badly-needed system-wide fix.

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Thank you, San Fernando Valley AfD

We wish "hail and farewell" to members of the Alliance's San Fernando Valley chapter, who have decided to formally disband in order to work directly on what has been a long-time key issue: public funding of elections.

One of the major accomplishments of the SVF chapter had been the initiation of the California Clean Money Campaign. Last year, a bill to publicly fund the Secretary of State race passed the California Assembly and Senate, and is due to go to the public for a vote in 2010. Chapter members have been very active in outreach and public education in order to build grassroots support for passage of this ballot question.

We'd like to thank chapter president Robin Gilbert, as well as long-time chapter member and former AfD national council members Dolly Arond and Jo Seidita, as well as all the SVF chapter members who built the organization through their work on member outreach, administration, and newsletters.

We'll keep everyone updated on the progress of the California Clean Money initiative, in the hopes that a victory on the ballot next year leads to more funding for more state races, and greater support in other states for clean elections. To see what's going on check out the campaigns' websites, Californians for Fair Elections and the California Clean Money Campaign.

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No decision this week on Citizens United v. FEC

A decision in the "Hillary the Movie" case, Citizens United v. FEC, has been expected since early this month. Monday could have seen an announcement from the Supreme Court, but the justices handed down decisions in three other cases instead. Look for a December decision at the earliest. Meanwhile, USA Today analyzes the impact of a pro-corporate-money decision in the case on governors' races--corporate campaign spending in several states is banned now, but these rules would be overturned if the court finds in favor of Citizens United.

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Diebold and the electronic vote: the rig is up

ESS's purchase of Diebold's voting machine division gives one company with notorious ties to the GOP control of eighty percent of the votes cast on touchscreen machines. But that's merely the tip of a toxic iceberg.

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman. Posted on The Rag Blog September 24, 2009

Unless U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in 2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation. With 80% ownership of America's electronic voting machines, ES&S could have the power to shape America's future with a few proprietary keystrokes.

ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous.

Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.

But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a reliable vote count in the future.

For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold in tandem will still control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign spending, the only difference could be that those who would buy our elections will have to write two checks instead of one.

And in fact, it's even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful of sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count millions of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who gets to vote and who doesn't.

Let's do a quick review:

1. ES&S, Diebold and other companies tied to election hardware and software are owned and operated by a handful of very wealthy conservatives, or right-to-life ideologues, with long-standing direct ties to the Republican Party;

2. As votes will be increasingly cast on optiscans, touchscreens or computer voting machines in the United States in 2010, the scant few so-called paper trail mechanisms that are in place will offer little security against electronic vote theft;

3. The source code on all U.S. touchscreen machines now used for the casting and counting of ballots is proprietary, meaning the companies that own and operate the machines -- including ES&S -- are not required to share with the public the details of how those machines actually work;

4. Although there are official mechanisms for monitoring and recounts, none carry any real weight in the face of the public's inability to gain control or even access to this electronic source code, whose proprietary standing has been upheld by the courts;

5. With the newly merged ES&S/Diebold now apparently controlling 80% of the national vote through hardware and software, this GOP-connected corporation will have the power to alter virtually every election in the U.S. with a few keystrokes. Unless there is a massive, successful grassroots campaign between now and 2012, the same will hold true for the next US presidential election;

6. Aside from its control of touchscreen machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S also controls a significant percent of the electronic optiscan tabulators to count cards on which voters use pencils to fill in circles, indicating their vote. Accounts of fraud, rigging, theft and abuse of these optiscan systems are well-documented and innumerable. Any corporation that prints these ballots and runs the machines designated to count them can control yet another major piece of the US vote count;

7. The merged ES&S/Diebold now also controls the electronic voter registration systems in many counties and states. With that control comes the ability to remove registered voters without significant public accountability. In the 2004 election, nearly 25% of all the registered voters in the Democratic-rich city of Cleveland were purged, including 10,000 voters erased "accidentally" by a Diebold electronic pollbook system. So in addition to controlling the vote counts on touchscreen and optiscan voting machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S and sympathetic hardware and software companies that service computerized voting equipment will control who actually gets to cast a vote in the first place.

Lest we forget: in 2000, long before this ES&S/Diebold purchase was proposed, Choicepoint, a GOP-controlled data management firm, hired by Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, removed up to 150,000 Florida citizens from voter rolls on the pretense that they were ex-felons. The vast majority of them were not.

Computer software "disappeared" 16,000 votes from Al Gore's column at a critical moment on election night, allowing George W. Bush’s first cousin John Ellis, a Fox News analyst, to proclaim him the winner. The election was officially decided by less than 700 votes and a 5-4 Supreme Court vote preventing a full recount. An independent audit later showed Gore was the rightful winner.

In 2004, more than 300,000 Ohio citizens were removed from voter rolls by GOP-controlled county election boards (more than one million have been removed since).

Various dirty tricks prevented still tens of thousands more Ohioans from voting. The vote count was marred by a wide range of official manipulations coordinated by then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Diebold was a major player in the 2004 Ohio elections, but was joined by numerous other computer voting firms and their technicians in "recounting the vote" which confirmed the Bush "victory," despite exit poll results and other evidence to the contrary. In defiance of a federal court order, 56 of 88 Ohio counties destroyed some or all of their ballots or election records. No one has been prosecuted.

In short, the ES&S purchase of Diebold's voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg. Voiding the merger will do nothing to solve the REAL problem, which is an electronic-based system of voter registration and ballot counting that is potentially controlled by private corporations and contractors whose agenda is to make large profits and protect the system that guarantees them.

Although elections based on universal automatic registration and hand-counted paper ballots are not foolproof, they constitute a start. Stealing an election by stuffing paper ballot boxes at the "retail" level is far more difficult than stealing votes at the "wholesale" level with an electronic flip of a switch.

As it's done in numerous other countries throughout the world, the only realistic means by which the U.S. can establish a democratic system of ballot casting and counting is to do it the old-fashioned way. With human-scale checks and balances we might even be secure in the knowledge that our elections and vote counts will truly reflect the will of the people. What a concept!

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, available at freepress.org at, where this article also appears, and where Bob's Fitrakis Files are also available. Harvey Wasserman's History of the U.S. is at harveywasserman.com.

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Supreme Count Rules For-Against Limiting Corporate Funding For Political Campaigns

The decision by the Supreme Court is due Tuesday 8 Nov 09.

Here are links to AfD's blog posts about this issue.

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